A thought struck me yesterday as I was toying with drop.io. Terms like cellular, mobile, and web 2.0 are slowly going to fade. The key to new social media is transparency. Usability is going to be a barrier to overcome so that the user doesn’t feel like they are taking a series of steps on a phone, but instead feel like they’re making instantaneous connections without thinking about it at all.
Twitter is cool, but some of the more advanced mobile features are like little command line commands. Technology people are cool with that and early adopters are willing to learn it, but what about a 14-yr old? Bringing those services to those consumers is going to require a big improvement in the UI and probably take a lot more bandwidth.
A phone or computer is still a relatively crude device when you consider the number of steps it takes to accomplish a task. After a while it feels natural, but for a lot of day-to-day things, it could be a lot simpler. We’re just not there yet. We’ll get there. Apple took a step in the right direction with the iPhone when they totally disregarded all current phone interfaces. Even that is only the beginning.
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Tags: drop.io, mobile, Social Media, usability
thanks for the note tony. this is sam lessin from drop.io, we totally agree with your point about transparency being the next big barrier. It is easy to remove the barriers to use, but it is hard to make it really clear what a service is doing and what the results of interfacing with it will be. that is what we are working on right now, making a service which is totally upfront and transparent about how it functions and what the results of interacting with it will be
Hey Sam, thanks for taking the time to respond. drop.io seems like a step in the right direction. Good luck with your efforts.
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