I like to fashion myself a valued contributor to the world at large. I write witty reviews on Yelp allowing other to avoid my epicurean misadventures. I caution moviegoers on Netflix and Flixster to avoid spending a king’s ransom on “Avatar.”I share photos that make grown men weep on Facebook, Kodak Gallery and Picasa. My hilarious videos go to YouTube. My prose on books lives on Amazon. Naturally, I tweet daily @therogueanalyst. Wine reviews? Those are on Snooth.
Now, I am surely over exaggerating the quality of my contributions, but the truth is, I do engage in all of these and I also admit that I may have a problem. When I first joined Facebook my desire was for the social network to be the conduit through which all my created content would flow.
Unfortunately, my best laid plans never really worked out so well. My Yelp reviews would show up as status updates, my photos live in multiple locations because I like geotagging them and best I can tell Facebook doesn’t allow that. Amazon and Facebook don’t seem to play very well together. Even if I could resolve these issues, do people in San Francisco care if I just reviewed a restaurant in Boston? Do those that think People deserves a Pulitzer want to know my opinions on Goodwin’s tome, “Team of Rivals?”In short, no. And thus a better solution must be proffered.
Now, you may be wondering–how will mobility factor in? Primarily, mobile will enable individuals to contribute even more content; location updates, check-ins–indicating your arrival at a specific location, pictures of entrees, reviews as one eats, etc. New social networks emerge as well. The report, Global Mobile Social Networking Forecast 2006-2013, authored by David MacQueen, the director of Strategy Analytics’ Wireless Media Strategies team, shows the growth of the mobile social networking market–consumer spending will exceed $1.7 billion by 2013.
Services such as FourSquare and Gowalla use location as the premise of their social networks, which also offer virtual and real prizes for visiting certain locations (as discussed on my blog in February). Instead of further disintermediating the experience, mobile should bring the experience together. Motorola has started the process with the introduction of MotoBLUR–an experience that combines many social networks into one unified interface. But MotoBLUR is just the beginning.
I was facing this conundrum when I came upon an article on TechCrunch that highlighted some of these challenges, which got me thinking that smartphones are only going to make the problem worse as new disparate services emerge allowing ever more information to be stored. As one that has never been good at committing–there are plenty of people that can confirm that–opting for only one service is not a likely solution…Continued
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