We held our second MobileMonday Miami event last week!

Thanks to those who participated and thanks to Myk Willis, CEO and Founder of Myxer, who gave an awesome presentation of this fast-growing  mobile startup. Mobile Monday Miami co-organizer and co-founder Jeffrey Sass (pictured) graciously hosted the event at Myxer’s offices in Deerfield Beach.

MobileMonday is a global community fostering cooperation and business development through networking events to share ideas, best practices and trends in the mobile industry. We’re excited to create a mobile community in Miami and look forward to its continued growth. If you’re into mobile, you’re invited to attend and participate in our free events.

The next one will be on June 9th, 2008 at Nokia’s offices by the Miami Airport. If you’re interested in attending, please RSVP on the Facebook event page, or just get in touch with me.

Table of contents for object-centered sociality series

1. The use of social objects as artefacts for identity management
2. Social objects and the observer’s paradox
3. Social object and the object-centered environment

My previous post about “social objects”, described how your profile, what you publish and what share online determines the impression you make and provides topics or hooks for others to get in touch with you. The term social object is a convenient shorthand for describing such hooks, which represent many of the reasons people socialize with each other online; this theory is referred to by sociologists as “object-centered sociality”.

Other ways to socialize include phatic communication, although arguably even small talk may be carried out for ulterior motives.

“No Man’s Blog” has an excellent analysis of identity management and phatic communication through the use of Facebook applications.

Objections raised

My post garnered excellent, lengthy comments. Referring to Hugh MacLeod posts here and here, one of the commenters, Bernard Tremblay voices a valid, if strongly worded, objection on his blog to the use of the term “Social Object”. Bernard laments that the term seems prone to profiteering by marketing “snake oil salesmen”:

The moment draws nigh when we take one more step: “you came over just to chew the fat with Pam” … right. But what happens when we use “social objects” as our lens? We see that entirely social impulse in terms of transaction … the title of the piece is “marketing” and properly so: what we’ve done here is reduced the whole to an exchange between providers and consummers [sic].

Yet the trend is clear …

There’s plenty evidence that brands are investing heavily in online word-of-mouth marketing. According to PQ Media,

Spending on word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing jumped 35.9% in 2006 to $981.0 million and is expected to top $1 billion in 2007, making it one of the fastest growing alternative media segments. Driving the growth is the continued consumer shift to alternative media and the marketers’ need for increased brand engagement and ROI. These are some of the findings of the first in-depth analysis of the emerging word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing industry released today by PQ Media, the leading provider of alternative media econometrics (www.pqmedia.com).

Helping to fuel this growth are a projected 3.5 billion brand-related conversations per day in the U.S., according to Keller Fay Group, with nearly 80% of consumers trusting recommendations from family, friends and “influential” persons over all other forms of advertising and marketing.

Need more evidence? According to Nielsen, vehicle discussions are up 40% since January 2007. Interestingly, the same article displays Nielsen’s “Brand Association Map, which is a “a visualization tool to map how consumers naturally think and talk about brands online.” This is how the social object plays out in conversations. Here’s an example of a map of conversations about Nike.

Pitfalls abound!

So let’s all hop on the word-of-mouth bandwagon, and let’s do it by creating social objects for people to engage in object-oriented sociality, but under own terms, right? Not surprisingly, this type of thinking is fraught with pitfalls. Some examples come to mind:

• Should brands join or build social networks? Consider the $2 to $3 Million “Connecting with Cookies” site, whose shortcomings are described here by Kami: “Connecting with Cookies is pure advertising and the site is a brochure. There is nothing wrong with that, but if Pepperidge Farms was sold a social media site, this isn’t it.”
• McDonald’s strained effort to create a Starbuck’s-like experience in its stores, which according to this FastCompany article, is certain to bomb: “Remember McPizza? Me neither. I’ve read it was neither better nor worse than Pizza Hut or Domino’s Pizza, but it was a miserable failure. Why? Because when you go into a McDonald’s, you’re going to be bullied out of your pizza-eating mood (assuming you entered with one in the first place) by the sweet stink of the flagship fare. The place reeks of fries and beef. McDonald’s has spent millions of dollars developing chemical aromas for its fries, burgers and chicken, and they are every bit as intoxicating as they were meant to be. You know that frustration you experience when you try to hum one song while another is playing on the radio? That very dissonance was the demise of the McPizza, and will claim McCoffee next.”
• And more generally, some companies and brands are paying bloggers and social networkers to advocate their product, for instance by using Pay-Per-Posts’ rebranded SocialSpark service (good introductory video, though and props for the greater transparency with the disclosure badge). From the video: “… the perfect way for brands who want to engage bloggers in a more controlled atmosphere” … lol. As if you could craft real conversations between people to mirror the laundry detergent ads on TV.

Censoring or attempting to control the word-of-mouth is equally misguided, as in the case of Microsoft doing away with the Blue Monster; according to Robert Scoble: “@gapingvoid: yeah, someone inside Microsoft killed the Blue Monster. Sigh. Microsoft’s committees kill everything cool.” The alternative would have been to let the Blue Monster live its own life and retire itself when Microsoft does start changing the world again.

The Observer’s Paradox:

Zero Influence points out that “Brand as a Narrative prevents the Brand existing as Embodiment. Brands need to live within the architecture of life, not on the perception plane. Trying to get a purchasing audience to care about a Brand is costly compared to using your Brands affordances to improve the infrastructure of life. In this case giving is cheaper than advertising.”

In “The Gift”, Lewis Hyde makes this point by describing an English fairy tale of a …

“… Devonshire man to whom the fairies had given an inexhaustible barrel of ale. Year after year the liquor ran freely. Then one day the man’s maid, curious to know the cause of this extraordinary power, removed the cork from the bung hole and looked into the cask; it was full of cobwebs. When the spigot next was turned, the ale ceased to flow.

The moral is this: the gift is lost in self-consciousness. To count, measure, reckon value, or seek the cause of a thing, is to step outside the circle, to cease being ‘all of a piece’ with the flow of gifts and become, instead, one part of the whole reflecting on another part.”

Because life is grainy and each bit, the good and the bad, make up your experience. The things we love most may have lots of defects. When things are too easy, we take them for granted. And when things sound too rosy, we distrust them. And if you look into the source of your gift, you’ll lose the shine in your own self-consciousness.

The same thing applies when designing spaces for consumer interaction with your social objects.

Talking about Relational Aesthetics and art, where the audience is envisaged as a community, French theorist Nicholas Bourriaud, curator at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, says,

“There are two ways of building an institution. One way is to build a jewelry box to present objects and the other one is to conceive of it as an open market where everything is removable and you can change things all the time. .…

I think that maybe the idea of being relevant, of being useful, of being pertinent is more important to artists than just doing something new .…

Ten years ago, it would have been completely impossible to consider a DJ as an artist for example. Now, it’s normal. Nobody would even think of saying ‘you’re already playing pre-existing records, so you’re not an artist.’ That’s vanished. The idea of the artist as a kind of demi-god creating the world from a blank sheet of paper is something that has just vanished from our every day culture. The fact that the DJ or programmer or artist uses already existing forms in order to say what they want to say is something that is certainly the most important thing at the moment because it totally goes beyond the art world.”

If you’re a brand, consider becoming a DJ with your products and services. There are plenty of examples, including Radiohead’s latest album, Amazon’s customer service (“Jeff used to say that if you did something good for one customer, they would tell 100 customers”), and Dell’s Ideastorm.

So Design for Hackability (pdf file, via PLSJ). Design for play and join your audience. Just don’t make it slick and stop your bean-counting, if you want to build engaging experiences with your community around your social objects.

Powered by ScribeFire.

677 page phone bill from iTapio on Vimeo.

I got a BlackBerry about a month and a half ago with AT&T /
Cingular and asked for the unlimited data and text plan plan. A couple of weeks
later, I got my first bill which was only a couple of pages long. Soon
thereafter, I turned on Twitter notifications on my mobile to take
advantage of the unlimited plan. Now, apparently it takes one full
billing cycle to sign yourself onto ebilling. Lo and behold, I just
received my mammoth-sized phone bill. Not in charges, which amounted to
about $148, but in pages: 677.

Through Twitter, I have
received about 15,000 text messages on my mobile. They all all arrive
to the same phone number. The itemized bill lists the date, hour and
minute I received each text message. Quite obviously, I won’t go
through to verify each of these, particularly when the charge on each
one is precisely $0.00! I would have been just as happy with a single
line item that read “Number of text messages received: 15,000″

See also iJustine’s 300-page iPhone bill.

digg story

Technorati Tags: at&t, att, mobile, phone bill, billing, twitter, ijustine, video

moments, originally uploaded by alex*c.

even the memorable moments in your life pile up, when placed next to each other, like a stack of pictures … and of those, which moments really stand out?

Scrapblog had been TechCrunched before, but not like this: The Real Scrapblog is Here … Finally. Previously, either we were still open with the first version, or we had put on the “bubble wrap” as we prepared for launch.

Except, of course, we haven’t launched yet!

We had been handing out a preview URL (www.scrapblog.com/preview) to friends and previous users of Scrapblog, to help us kick the tires, adjust the mirrors and rev up the engine before we got on the highway.

Despite our plans, it didn’t quite work out that way and once TechCrunch posted URL, bloggers picked it up and word started to get out.

At this point, our advisors, including Shel, David and Tara, and our peers, including Jeremiah, Hyku, Douglas Karr, and Ryan Stewart pitched in with their respective megaphones to point out that we’re still tidying up around here

Lost in this excitement was a bit of heroism by our developers, who had already been pushed to the max. As  Tara and Ryan
describe, Omar and his team stepped up to the plate to collaborate with Adobe’s Apollo team, who wanted to demo a kick-ass application. Since Scrapblog is built in Flex, Omar downloaded the Apollo SDK and stitched together a demoable application for the platform.

With a bit more work, we can be ready for Apollo, which totally rocks. It’s a bit early, but it’ll be great to support mobile and wireless platforms, including laptops, and to be able to work on scrapblogs, presentations and slideshows on the browser, without being connected to the internet.

As a bonus, it runs on the laptop as well and now we can demo Scrapblog without being connected

„, to be continued …

Technorati Tags: scrapblog, techcrunch, david parmet, shel israel, tara hunt, jeremiah owyang, hyku, douglas karr, ryan stewart

File this under “Yet Another iPhone Lover”. I think the iPhone rocks, and I haven’t even seen it yet.

A while back I wrote about “Solitary Mobility vs. Mobile Sociality”.

Ipod_ad2

Of course, iPods may be used in a social context as well, as a “social object”. And there’s Zune’s tagline of “Welcome to the Social”

(via Community Guy):

Welcome_to_the_social_1

But sharing music on iPods isn’t all that easy. Also, according to Gizmodo, 42% of the songs people are trying to share on Zune are on the “Zune sharing prohibited” list. My guess is that these would be the songs people are most trying to share anyway. So much for that idea and the primary function of MP3 players is still about solitary mobility.

With a mobile phone, on the other hand, you achieve “mobile sociality” because the phone is by definition meant for communication, a social activity. The idea was to say that given a choice of taking either the iPod or the mobile phone when you walk out the door, most would choose the mobile phone because it allowed you to stay in contact with others, through voice, SMS, e-mail, etc. For instance, according to Martin Parr:

There is no escaping this modern phenomenon [of people talking on mobile phones] and my relationship is one of “I couldn’t survive without it” but what a pain in the arse they are.

With hybrid mp3-phones, you have both mobile sociality and solitary mobility. Quoting from David Byrne’s Journal:

An ad for a cell phone with speakers that slide out. A crowded city street. Everyone is wearing white iPod headphones and clear fishbowls on their heads. They are all isolated in a world of their own, is the clear implication. One couple tries to smooch through their glass prisons — but everyone knows you can’t kiss with a fishbowl on your head. One guy, clearly frustrated, takes off his space helmet/fishbowl and smashes it into a million pieces on the street. He rips out his headphones and begins listening to music from a small object he proudly holds aloft. A cell phone with tiny speakers that slip out. (I can imagine the sound quality! Freedom! A 1962 transistor radio!) Immediately all the other young hipsters take off their helmets and rip off their iPod headphones and are grooving to this guy’s tunes! The world, it is implied, has been liberated by a new gizmo and an early adopter. Bring back boom boxes on the subways!

Enter the iPhone: iPod+phone+internet all_in_one_device. No more choosing between mobile sociality or solitary mobility. And we all knew the iPhone was coming, didn’t we?

Technorati Tags: iphone, apple,  mobile+sociality, solitary+mobility

Last night’s Fanny’s Party was a lot of fun, with lots of friends, including Yann, Jacques, Galienni, Pappy, Nicolas, Fanny, Charles (x2), Romain, Emmanuel and some new acquaintances, including Benjamin Bejbaum of Dailymotion, where I’ve been streaming videos since May-June.

Fanny’s Party is in a sense the equivalent of MobileMonday for Paris, although no formal presentations or conferences are given. There are always lots of gadgets, though, as well as giveaways!

Nicolas, Jacques

Benjamin, Galienni

Pappy

Fanny

Emmanuel

There are 1.5 billion mobile devices in the world today, more than three   times the number of PCs. As the devices increase capabilities and networks get   faster, consumers are using mobile devices more and more for common computing   and information gathering tasks.

This is a follow-up to a previous post where I picked up on Charlie Schick’s notion of mobile devices’ foreground and background operation. I mentioned that “the notion of background should be extended to include the automated functions, ie. the work, that you delegate to your laptop or mobile phone while you’re off doing something else. For instance, downloading podcasts, downloading torrents, distributed computing, tracking RSS feeds, presence on IM, logging IRC channels, and arguably your blog (virtual self) are some of the “work” that can occur in the background.”

Debi, aka “Mobile Jones”, makes a great point in her post about Web and Mobile Fragmented as Thought Prisoners of Jargon 

“If language can shape thought, then this may explain why so many web centric services, applications and standards neglect mobility in their development and why mobile operators don’t grasp the lessons learned on the web over the past decade.  What some have labeled willful disregard may simply be a function of two different spheres of jargon.”

Whether you believe there’s a relationship between language and thought — or not — professionals in different fields develop a jargon to describe the objects, tastes, textures and activities related to their domain. For instance, enology has its own language for describing winemaking tools and processes and the taste of wine. Similarly, lawyers, doctors, engineers, carpenters, firefighters, the clergy and so on have all developed their own vocabulary around their expertise. In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell talks of the “Gift of expertise” (pg. 176), showing how professional foodtasters precisely describe their reactions to specific foods along six dimensions of appearance, ten dimensions of texture and fourteen dimensions of flavor.

However, expert jargon becomes a “problem” when the language strips meaning from human context and usage. As  Debi further points out (see also Janne Jalkanen):

From the mobile universe, WAP 2.0 (xHTML), J2ME, MIDP, WAP push, SyncML, transcoding and IMS (IP Multimedia   Subsystem) are examples of its jargon. The web universe is focused on AJAX,   Web 2.0, CSS, xHTML, RSS, Atom as examples of its jargon. Sharp eyes will see some commonalities between these technologies regardless of their different terminology.

Indeed. Janne further speculates that “[people will] be wanting things on their computers that work like their mobile phones … If you’re now thinking about your cell phone as an inferior laptop — try looking it another way: maybe your laptop is an inferior, bulky version of your cell phone.” (Charlie Schick calls it the “mobile tail wagging the web dog”).

Visual representation is one way of moving beyond the confines of language. Another is understanding objects by personifying them (see anthropomorphism). For instance, sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour describes a self-closing door in human terms :

“On a freezing day this February, posted   on the door of La Halle aux Cuirs at La Villette, in Paris … could be seen,   a small hand-written notice: “The groom is on strike, for God’s sake, keep the   door closed” (groom is Frenglish for an automated door-closer or butler). This   fusion of labor relations, religion, advertisement, and technique in one   single insignificant fact, is exactly the sort of thing I want to describe in order to discover the missing masses of our society.”

With the many functions that can be developed for mobile devices, we can personify the mobile phone and list some possible roles for it. Some roles are better done on a laptop than on a mobile, and vice versa, but the experience should be seamless and you should be able to pick up on one where you left off on the other. With the advent and rise of web services, online storage and wi-fi access, we will essentially be able to perform the same functions and access the same information through a mobile device, as through a laptop.

So, here’s a quick and incomplete list of the various roles your mobile device can play, in no particular order and perhaps with some overlap.

1. Butler, your head servant for domestic chores 
2. Herald, to announce your arrival or actions 
3. Copilot, to help you navigate by interpreting maps and location 
4. Shopping assistant: bringing you relevant addresses, recommendations and coupons 
5. Librarian or research assistant: bringing you the right information 
6. Opponent or buddy, to challenge you or to help you play 
7. Matchmaker or host, helping you meet the right people at parties or conferences 
8. News anchor, keeping you current on what you need to know 
9. Record keeper or logger, keeping track of your activities 
10. Lifesaver, helping you in case of emergencies 
11. DJ or entertainer, playing your music and distracting you 
12. Usher, streaming your movies 
13. Personal trainer, helping you work out 
14. Secretary, reminding you of your appointments 
15. Photographer, helping you capture special moments 
16. Postman, delivering your messages 
17. Operator, helping you call and communicate

Here are some non-human delegated roles:

1. Dog, your loyal agent that fetches what you need and that keeps you company (and which you take care of and feed, ie.recharge) 
2. Beacon or marker, to signal or broadcast your presence, location, speed and/or direction 
3. Wallet, storing your important id numbers and helping you pay for stuff 
4. Status symbol, signaling others through your phone model and the way you use it

These various roles create an augmented presence for people as they move around, with an invisible delegated flurry of activity going on. This activity may be long range through persistent central searches, agents and presence, for instance, and some of this activity may be proximity-based, affecting your personal area network. For instance, you might set your smartphone to continually search for and connect with Bluetooth devices around you, thus heralding your presence, identity and wish to socialize.

What functions or roles will you delegate to your mobile device? And what will you delegate to your laptop?

 “Internet standards are opening the traditionally closed phone network. With the adoption of VoIP for transport and VoiceXML as the application language, now anyone, anywhere can build creative new services for the phone,” said Mike McCue, Tellme CEO and Co-founder. “By partnering with Skype, we believe this community will begin to set the standard for the way people build, buy and deliver phone services globally.”

Skype callers will pay for chargeable voice services from their Skype Credit account with a percentage of the fee going to the content provider who created the service. Content providers’ voice services will be reviewed and the most popular will be deployed and listed on the Skype website. Details about how to submit applications and the fee structure will be announced later this month.

The convergence of telecommunications and the Web is now bringing the benefits of Web technology to the telephone, enabling Web developers to create applications that can be accessed via any telephone, and allowing people to interact with these applications via speech and telephone keypads.

In fact, the notion of background should be extended to include the automated functions, ie. the work, that you delegate to your laptop or mobile phone while you’re off doing something else. For instance, downloading podcasts, downloading torrents, distributed computing, tracking RSS feeds, presence on IM, logging IRC channels, and arguably your blog (virtual self) are some of the “work” that can occur in the background. But this is getting a bit off the track and deserves its own post