Thinker, connector and builder. Contemplating the future of media consumption and storytelling. Immersed in digital, mobile, news, data, design, marketing and disruption.
Product Manager @ Yahoo!7.
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People snap Instagram pics everywhere - bars, restaurants, bathrooms and even secretive company headquarters. Worldcam is an impressive web app that lets you find all the photos taken with Instagram from any location you specify.
Brad Stone:
At the time of his death, Jobs had come to loathe Google, which he felt was copying features of the iPhone while withholding a key feature of Google Maps that allows smartphones to dictate turn-by-turn directions aloud. Jobs also discussed pulling Google search from the iPhone, but figured that customers would reject that move, according to two former Apple executives.
We knew that Jobs wanted to go thermonuclear on Google, but Stone provides some insight on just how far he was prepared to go to nix their services completely from the iPhone.
A new App.net third party client from Tapbots that will be very familiar to anyone who uses Tweetbot. This is a marquee app for the fledgling social network, and could help drive adoption among the early adopters.
If you’re not familiar with App.net, it’s a Twitter-like social network but the key feature is that there are no ads and never will be as it’s a paid service. As Twitter moves towards being a more media-centric company and starts restricting it’s API usage, early adopters of the service are revolting.
In functionality, App.net is a Twitter experience from a few years ago, before the introduction of summary cards, the discover tab and promoted tweets. Whether it can move beyond the early adopter crowd is another question.
The Pew Survey looked at news consumption on smartphones and tablets, and has confirmed some things I had suspected - people who own tablets as well as smartphones are consuming more news, more often.
Almost one-third of people who acquire tablets find themselves reading more news from more sources than before.
The study paints a bright picture for news consumption on mobile devices. These emerging devices are allowing people to stay more up-to-date and consume more news than ever before.
News is a large part of what people do with their mobile devices. Fully 64% of tablet owners get news on their devices at least weekly, including 37% who do so daily. The numbers are similar for smartphone owners – 62% consume news weekly or more and 36% do so daily. For both tablets and smartphones, news is among the top activities people engage in on the devices.
Users are expecting the news to be delivered no matter where they are or what device they are using.
It’s the emerging concept of the ‘multi-platform user’, someone that wakes up with their iPhone, catches the train to work with the iPad, browses the net on their work PC and comes home to their laptop.
While the iPad has driven this, the introduction of cheaper Android tablets such as the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 is going diversify the market.
Ellis Hamburger:
Facebook has been rapidly updating its messenger platform, and shows no sign of stopping.
Apple needs to release an iMessages client for Windows and Android, and then it will have a fighting chance of becoming the ubiquitous messaging platform to rival SMS.
For a messaging system, cross-platform is key. SMS can be relied upon because it works on everyone’s mobile device, without this iMessages will never fully replace SMS. Facebook has a better chance of ubiquity as more devices will have a Facebook client installed than an iMessages client.
The clever thing Apple did was bake in iMessages to the SMS app in iOS. This means that if you’re on an iPhone you don’t need to think about sending someone an iMessage, it just happens automatically.
However if you’re on an iPad or Mac and want to message someone, then you need to think about which messenger platform to use. If you haven’t messaged them before, you’ll need to reach out to your iPhone to try SMS first. You could also try Facebook if they are a friend. This platform dependancy is where iMessages loses, it needs to be a process where you don’t even think about it.
Every time you seek an alternative to contact someone is another reason that iMessages is not the next SMS yet, not even the next BBM.
There are some apps that are truly delightful when you use them, and animations can play a big part in that. Animations can help apps inform, engage or welcome the user. Raizlabs lists some great examples of their effective use.
Average time spend (h:m:s) on social media each month:
- Australia – 6:52:28
- United States -6:09:13
- United Kingdom – 6:07:54
- Italy – 6:00:07
- Spain – 5:30:55
Australians are clearly big users of social media, which is in contrast to the unsophisticated strategies Aussie businesses are using to capitalise on this engagement. We hear more about social media disasters than innovative strategies or deep two-way communication that drives a strong return on investment.
Australians are curious, we love to socialise and connect. We have a culture of mateship and supporting the battlers, shying away from advertising messages. Businesses need to rethink using traditional marketing messages in social media outreach, as they can and often will backfire.
It’s not enough to run a social media ‘campaign’, spruiking a product or service through some half-baked Facebook competition. Marketers need to understand that to be effective in social media, there is a need to let go of reputational inhibitions and engage in a real dialogue. Speaking with the audience on the same level not through a PR spin machine that fails to take into account the rallying power of citizen journalism.
Traditional marketing messages won’t work in social media. The best marketers will be the ones that use effective, long-term relationship building techniques, as opposed to short term PR stunts.
Don’t build an app based on your website. Build the app that acts as if websites never existed in the first place.
If you’re building a product and it’s focused on the desktop, that’s a mistake. MG Siegler makes a good point that it’s a now a mobile-first world, if you’re building for the PC only you are betting on a shrinking platform.
We need to build mobile products without the constraints of the desktop era. We need to understand user behaviour on mobile devices, and not just cram a desktop experience into a smaller screen.
If your product is not mobile-first or mobile-only, then you’re missing the boat.
