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- They access the Internet using a smartphone and/or computer. Using the Internet to consume information is common over computerThe usage of computers to read information over the Web is common, but the use of smartphones is less so. These users are willing to pay additional money to gain the ability to consume data on the go: first, by buying a smartphone instead of a cheaper feature phone; and second, by purchasing a data plan from a carrier, which has wider coverage than Wi-Fi, but costs more for the same amount of data. The most extreme cases enthusiastic users use unlimited data plans and resist carriers' attempts to move them over to limited plans. Overall, they They make substantial effort to be able expand their ability to consume information at any time.
- They are interested in staying up-to-date using information streams with more content than they are willing/able to read. These information streams include, but are not limited to, status updates (published to followers) on social websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, social news with comments on aggregators (available to everyone) such as Reddit and Hacker News, RSS feeds, and targetted messages (only available to parties enumerated by the sender) like email and private messages on Facebook. A key idea is that they demand information from a large array of sources: a person who only uses the Internet for email would not derive much utiltity from our project.
Interest in information over the Internet
The population can be divided into two classes based on how they deal with information overload; this problem can be defined as one having more information available than one is able to read in a reasonable time-frame (e.g. before the information becomes outdated or invalidated by new information).
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