Posts Tagged ‘mobile’

MinneWebCon 2008

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

I spent a great day at MinneWebCon yesterday talking with and meeting other folks in the industry at The Big U where I work and elsewhere.

It was really a good event for those of us in Minneapolis who are interested in current and emerging web technology. The interesting this to me is how much Twitter added to the experience for those of us participating.

If you weren’t monitoring things on Twitter, you really missed out on an ongoing conversation. The most obvious observation is that there was a general air of excitement about the event and a lot of people were merely expressing that sentiment in real time. That had one benefit: I was able to get a sense of what was happening in sessions that I was not attending. At least once it influenced my decision to bail out of one session in favor of another.

The second, perhaps more valuable thing about Twitter at the event was a stream of continuous feedback. We were not 30 seconds into the conference before someone was commenting on the @klayon’s introduction. Tracking “#minnewebcon” from my cell phone was like having an ear to the wall. The best part about that? The organizers of the event responded directly to me about a couple of comments I made. They were paying attention and that’s important.

There will be more formal methods for providing feedback in the next few days, but if you want to troubleshoot the problems in real-time and address them, Twitter is your friend.

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Posted in MinneWebCon, Mobile Technology, New Media, Social Media, Twitter | 1 Comment »

Transparency

Friday, April 11th, 2008

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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Posted in Mobile Technology, Social Media, usability | 3 Comments »

Go Mobile Young Man!

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

I’ve previously commented that mobile technology is the next frontier in the technology sphere. It seems that Mike Arrington at TechCrunch agrees. Look for the next tech boom to be in mobile technology. It’s going to connect us in ways we never dreamed possible.

In the mid nineties when what we know as the web was overtaking the Gopher procotol and computers were entering homes and lifestyles everywhere, there was some talk about the dehumanizing effect of the personal computer. Baby Boomers were worried that the kids would spend too much time isolated in front of the computer screen. That notion seems so quaint now.

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Posted in Mobile Technology, Social Media | No Comments »

Will Twitter Get Benched?

Friday, April 4th, 2008

The Industry Standard put Twitter on it’s “predicted to fail” list.

Failings: There’s no compelling reason for most people to use it, and many existing services — ranging from AIM to FriendFeed to social networks — have overlapping functionality. And how is it supposed to make money?

That’s the $10,000 question isn’t it? (Pun intended.) Where’s the money in it?

When I was a senior in high school (in 1988), a teacher once told me that in the near future information would be the key factor in success and power. It sounded good, but I didn’t quite get what he was talking about at the time. Now look at us. Google is the case and point for what he was talking about.

The information contained in Twitter is not as voluminous as what Google has to offer, but it’s immediate. I know within seconds if someone is tweeting about something I’m tracking on Twitter. Seconds. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out a potential use for that information. And the last I checked, Twitter was still the most popular of the micromedia sites out there. I think it could go somewhere. You?

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Posted in New Media, Social Media, Twitter | No Comments »

Amazon.com Announces TextBuyIt

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Cell phones are quickly becoming the new frontier in emerging technology. I’m told that smart phone adoption rates are much higher in Japan and Europe. Here in the U.S., things are just heating up. Yesterday Amazon.com announced TextBuyIt, a service that will allow you to compare prices by sending a text message. Amazon sends a message in return with pricing info on the product in question w/ an option to buy from them on the spot.

Amazon TextBuyIt, which launched late Tuesday, lets people text the name of a product, its description or its UPC or ISBN to 262966 (that’s “Amazon” on the keypad) from anywhere their cell phones work – including from inside physical stores.

If Amazon stocks matching items, the service returns two results at a time. Shoppers can immediately buy one of the first two the selections by texting back the number “1″ or “2,” or they can ask for more by texting the letter “M.”

Paypal announced a similar service last year. Paypal offers more possibilities for independent retailers whereas Amazon’s service is a direct challenge to big box retailers. The only thing the two have in common is leveraging mobile phone technology. Therein lies the key. Terms like Web 3.0 will quickly become obsolete as mobile technology continues to emerge. What we’re going to see is a combination of traditional internet technology combined with mobile technology. What we consider “Web” is quickly moving beyond fiber optics and phone lines and is combining with wireless internet and cellular. Phones are cheap in comparison to computers. Their mobility makes communication even more instantaneous in an era where a story is old seconds after it first appears.

I never fully realized the appeal of this instantaneous communication until this year’s SXSW Interactive conference. I was following someone from Minnesota who was there and witnessed the takeover of a panel that was facilitated by backchannels created in Twitter and Meebo. I didn’t get a detailed account, but sitting in my office in Minneapolis, I was privy to something very interesting occurring in Austin, TX. I’ll be very surprised if I don’t read about it in Wired next month.

Last month I saw Matt Dickman speak and in part of his presentation, he covered the timing of information released about the 35W bridge collapse. It turns out that word got out via Twitter before traditional media had a chance to start reporting on it.

Two days ago, @chuckumentary reported on an oil spill via Twitter as it happened. The whole phenomenon has exciting implications for consumers, marketers, citizen journalists and friends. The connections no longer require us to be tethered to a computer. If you haven’t tried it, you have no idea how appealing that is.

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Posted in Amazon, New Media, Social Media | 1 Comment »

Using Social Networking Sites for Research

Friday, March 28th, 2008

Is there anyone out there who is leveraging social networking technology for research? It seems like there’s a lot of research out there on it, but who’s taking advantage of it? With a little imagination, it doesn’t seem hard to find some uses. Let’s start with an easy one: Twitter.

Where I work, we’re doing a study where we monitor a group of participants for 4 years. They come to the clinic every 4 weeks to have their blood drawn and fill out a survey. We also monitor their symptoms. It’s a study on mononucleosis. None of these participants have been exposed yet. We’re waiting to see when they are exposed. We want to see how sick they get and what the risk factors are.

Now every 2 weeks I send them a reminder to log in to our website and report any symptoms they may be having at the time. (It’s a simple little homebrewed application I developed. Thank you very much.) The process is fairly painless and once you’ve done it once, you can generally complete it in under a minute.

What if we used Twitter (or a Twitter-like tool) to do the same thing? Study participants follow a department profile. Once every two weeks a tweet goes out that says, “Have a sore throat? Fatigue? Swollen or Tender glands? Reply ‘d @truetone yes’”. We’d reach participants wherever they are instantly. No waiting until they are tethered to a computer.

In this case, the immediacy is not all that necessary. But I’m sure there is research out there where it could be beneficial. Doing marketing research? What better way to instantaneously compile data? What better way to instantaneously disseminate data? See where I’m headed?

There’s a lot of talk in marketing about engaging consumers. What if we frame research in marketing terms? I know of at least one department at The Big U that already does mass mailings. Let’s bring that into the 21st century. I’m just saying, with a little imagination, we can take advantage of some really fun, cutting edge technology. It may be more than just novel. It may be important.

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Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

I Was There

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

On a geological scale, I’m just a nanosecond. Smaller probably. By internet standards, I guess I’m an old man. For a while I was worried that I’d missed the boat. You know, came along too late. But as I look back, I’ve been on the internet for 14 years. Ever since I installed a Gopher client on my first 386 running Windows 3.0. I was there when Mosaic was a breakthrough for browsing the web–quickly replaced by Netscape.

Sure, I didn’t jump into website development right away, but by 1999 I was working on websites. If anyone remembers the first iteration of mp3.com, they got social networking back in 1998. I was in a band at the time and bands could link to “friends”. How colloquial that all seems.

By 2003, I’d built my own PHP-based blog CMS. By 2005 I was podcasting. In 2007 I got hooked on Twitter.

What’s next? There are a lot of folks out there trying to be the next big thing. Personally, I find it all quite inspiring. I think in the next few years, some standards will emerge and all of these tools will be available to us.

Imagine using Twitter for research. All your followers get an update from you and they simply report on back with a direct message “d @truetone I’m doing this.” Blam! Instant feedback. Somehow that just seems incredibly exciting to me.

So I used to worry that I’d waited too long. No more. This is only the beginning. It’s only going to get better.

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Posted in About the Author | No Comments »