Are you enslaved by your mobile device? Take this test!

We are all becoming slaves of our communication habits. With our mobile devices as the new high priests, we hail the prayer of information and we are bonded by blackberry and iPhone. You do not recognize yourself in this description?

Take this small test to see if you have become a slave to your mobile device:

• Do you never leave home without your mobile device? Get uncomfortable when you do?
• Are you holding your mobile device as soon as you have to wait longer than 30 seconds?
• Do you look at your mobile device, even use it, while someone else is standing next to you and talking with you?
• Do you check e-mail or messages every few minutes, even when there weren’t any the past few minutes?
• Are you using it while you are watching TV, or worse, while talking with your husband/wife/partner/friend?
• Are you using it while sitting on the toilet? Ever dropped it there?
• Do you turn it off, after the plane has taken off? Or even not turn it off at all?
• Do you turn the device back on before you have even left the plane? Or landed?
• Do you use it while talking with customers, business partners, family, friends?
• Does your child have to wait to say something to you until you are done checking your e-mail?
• Is your battery always empty, or are you always complaining about it?
• Is your mobile phone lying next to you when you are in bed?

If you can answer 3 or more of these questions with “yes”  then I suspect you are enslaved by your mobile device. You will probably experience cold turkey shivers when you are separated from your device. You are also alienating yourself from those that stand with you trying to interact.

The problem with these devices is that they suck up all your attention. When you are looking at the screen, it takes away your ability to focus on anything else. Especially while using a touch screen. It is impossible to multitask. It makes you look arrogant and uninterested if you give your mobile device more attention than another human being standing next to you. We are addicted to real-time information. We take our high priest of information with us to dinner, parties, at a bar, work, home, on the street, while we are waiting, and even to our beds when we go to sleep. It is enslaving us each time we receive new information. We become information addicts, and feel we gain status when we handle the information beast in public.

It’s time to face this and start taking control of our lives again. Focus again on those things that really matter. Instead of messaging someone electronically, why not pay genuine attention to the person standing next to you? We might find that all this access to real-time information gives us a false sense of control. It doesn’t really make your life better, it just makes you more distant.

Me? I score 7 out of 12. I think I can still be saved, but it won’t be easy.  I’ve decided I’m going to get rid of my ridiculous behavior. How about you?

Why noise will be tackled by scaling down the social media conversation

If anything web 2.0 technology has provided us the capabilities to have a continuous 24×7 public conversation on the web. There are blogs, communication services like Twitter, content services like YouTube, search services to help us find the things we need, profile services like Facebook or any other social network, and now aggregation and “noise” filtering services like Friendfeed and The Filter. Social media, or the ability to interact over any kind of media, provides the participants a never ending conversation space. It’s addictive, there is so much being produced, being shared, being launched, talked about that it forces our Internet backbone down on it’s knees and slowly into cardiac arrest. And we haven’t seen the end of it yet. There is an incredible sized population in Africa and Asia that isn’t on the web yet, but they will at some point.

I was thinking about this last night after I had written a post in which I argued that social media is timely. There isn’t a need to be participating 24×7 because there will always be something that’s important when you join in. I see this enormous conversation as a river of information passing by and me taking a plunge whenever I feel like it.

But the early adopters feel there is a real problem with this non-stop social media conversation . It’s the noise problem (Try a search on “noise” here for example). How can we find the things that are really important from that huge pile of information floating around. That is partially why we have aggregation and filtering services. Each of them, using one algorithm or another, tries to compile a tiny subset of the universe and present that to its users. The question that remains is whether or not the right tiny space is presented.

What all these technologies essentially do for us is remove all kinds of physical boundaries like time, distance and space. These constraints prevented us in the physical world to meet 1 Mln people at a time, getting to know people from any place in the world, have anyone that wants to, no matter where or when they are, listen to the things we say. Web technology removed those boundaries, essentially turning this digital world into a giant market square where we can meet.

While I’m writing this, Scott O’Raw just published a post which ties in really good with this one. In his post Scott talks about this very same conversation and worries about people like Robert Scoble trying to become a talkshow host. Robert is very often at the center of conversations (well in the tech world anyway), and that helps him deal with the massive amounts of information. It also makes the brand Scobleizer more sticky. Scott agitates against these shock and awl tactics just for the sake of getting attention. The article is well worth a read, so go over there and give it a shot.

And while all of these conversations seem rather attractive right now I wonder what will happen when not 10 Mln or a100 mln users but 1 Bln users are participating. Or 3 Bln. The entire population in this planet. Everything connected into one uber-social graph. Everyone talking to everyone on the largest virtual market square know to man. The entire digital universe becoming a social media heaven.

I believe we might just get lost in this universe. The conversation simply becomes too large for anyone to even remotely grasp its complexity. Right now we are all creating our own public appearance, getting enough Google or any other kind of juice so that we can actually be found and listened to. Just take a look at a relative small conversation Robert Scoble started just now over on Friendfeed. Imagine not 100-200 people talking and not really listening, but instead 1Mln or 5 Mln doing that. The conversation would lose it’s importance immediately. If the entire planet is out there, connected, wouldn’t that make us all anonymous again? I think so. I believe that once people have had a few experiences with the excitement of being part of this public conversation, they will settle down again. Humans aren’t capable of dealing with such complexity, and computer algorithms, filtering tactics, friend referrals, don’t really reduce the complexity, it just flattens out the conversation until we all hear the same things.

There are two reasons why I suspect that this global social media conversation will be less important in a next evolution of the web. The first reason is that in order to reduce complexity people will eventually fall back on smaller, more personal, more localized communities. The conversations taking place in such communities will be more immersed within the actual physical world the users live in. That doesn’t imply there won’t be a public conversation. I’m suggesting the smaller communities will prove to be much more valuable than large scale ones.

The second reason is that the most important access device that will be used for the web in the coming years is by its nature a very personal device. It’s your mobile phone, quickly turning into a hand held web browser with communication features. One of the characteristics of this device is that it tends to suck you in, leaving you unaware of your surroundings (probably why so many car accidents happen while people are using a mobile phone while driving). It effectively shuts down a few of our senses such as hearing and seeing (except for a tunnel vision). While the monitors on our computers will become larger, TV screen like, the mobile device will remain small and will draw all attention to it’s screen. As a result of this sucking in and the device’s graphical capabilities it is my believe that we simply can’t deal with the complexity of a conversation on a scale of millions. Instead, we will be using that device more effectively with those that we know, friends that we care about and trust. In other words, in much smaller communities. And with that descaling the noise problem will be reduced to a much smaller proportion.

We don’t really need noise filters, the sheer complexity of the social media conversation will resolve itself because we won’t find enough value to continue to participate in such immense structures. We will end up scaling down in smaller but more valuable communities. You can try it out today already. Just stop following people for the sake of it or the numbers. Try to select carefully and notice how the noise level drops to a point where quality and personal interactions take over the enormously crowded marketplace we are all visiting today

Why the iPhone is probably one of the worst mobile phones I have ever used

There is a lot of talk these days about the iPhone. You can’t open TechMeme without seeing yet another rumor about the next generation, 3G, whatever version of the iPhone Apple is about to release. As soon as any other mobile initiative is released it has to go through an iPhone comparison. Google is working with developers around the world to create a new mobile platform called Android. As soon as the first demo’s appear the tech blog community measures them up against the iPhone.

Well, sorry to say this, but the iPhone is probably one of the worst mobile phones I have seen in quite a while. Now, before you get all excited about that and state that I have gone mental, let me try to explain what I mean by that.

The iPhone, in my opinion, isn’t really a mobile phone. The iPhone is probably the most innovative handheld computer in the world. It has a unique feel to it, a nice operating system, a touch screen (which is old news in Japan and Europe really) and great usability. It provides us with a browsing experience unlike any other mobile device. It has a great display, a mediocre camera, it lets you play music, video, browse the web, anything a gadget lover might need. It just sucks as a phone. You can tell the iPhone was build by a computer manufacturer. It is a handled where someone decided to also add phone capabilities to. And it’s phone capabilities are worse than I had thought.

What are the two most important functions of a mobile phone (and no, I’m not talking to all you smartphone lovers out there)? Calling and SMS. It is as simple as that. This is an estimated 1 Trillion dollar business world wide! While the USA lags behind in SMS, the rest of the world produces 5-10 SMSes on average per user per day. SMS is a $ 100BLN business. A business larger than ALL social media and advertisement business on the entire web! Probably less than 5% of that big pile of revenues goes to data services. It will be growing for sure the coming years. But $ 1000 BLN is a really big number.

When we get all excited about the iPhone I’m sure we aren’t getting excited over it’s phone capabilities. We are excited about it’s ability to browse the web, to act like a small yet powerful handheld computer. And that is great. Apple surely did set a new standard there.

But have you ever tried to make a phone call on it. With all due respect, I could navigate my “old-fashioned” Nokia N95 way better than the iPhone. I’m estimating that using the N95 menu structures I can find and call a contact approximately 50% faster, and more importantly without making any errors. While the contact list on the iPhone looks flashy,  the touch screen controls create a lot of errors for me. I can’t search for a contact (Sorry if I can’t remember all 800 names in my contact list). Scrolling is great, but landing on the right name is difficult. How many times have you found the contact, clicked on it (expecting it to start making the call), clicked on it in the next screen (why for heavens sake), and then only found yourself to be in the “change details” screen instead of the calling screen.

How about SMS? I use that function as least as often as I call. I might type 30-40 SMSes on any given day. But with the touchscreen keyboard of the iPhone this has become a real pain. I touch the wrong letter too often. Not only was typing on my Nokia without an actual keyboard faster, what is more important, it was way less error-prone. And honestly, the pre-iPhone interfaces weren’t that good either, but a hell of a lot more workable than the iPhone now. I have written before about the need to rethink the mobile experience fundamentally. Apple did it, only they forgot the current main use of a phone. They were thinking handheld computer when they designed the iPhone.

I tried using the headset provided with the iPhone. Worked fine for calling. I took it out, left home without the headset. And I found out the hard way that the rest of the day I couldn’t make a phone call because the iPhone for some reason assumed I still had the headset installed. Probably a “bug” or mishap, but not being able to call without using the external speaker all day is a real pain. Never had that happen to me before.

I hope Google’s Android will lead to developments that do not always match the iPhone. It has set a standard in it’s own, we don’t need others cloning that. I hope Android developers will think about a better integrated experience. Not just the “new world” of web browsing and media consumption. But also including being able to call and send messages (sending e-mail has the same obvious problems on the iPhone).

Touch screens are great, but we either need bigger ones, or I need to sharpen my fingers to hit the right letter on the tiny little keyboard. One thing I do like about the iPhone’s SMS capabilities is the way it displays successive SMSes as conversations. Perfect, because that is what they are!

I’ll end this with a small wish I have written about before in a post called “We need a revolution in Mobile U thinking”:

I’ll give away one idea for making things better. Why not get rid of the whole inbox-outbox messaging paradigm. It sucks on a mobile phone. Instead convert the entire paradigm into a life stream, similar to the way Twitter and Jaiku work. It fits human behavior much better. We don’t always want to look into or respond to every message we receive. Showing these messages as a constant stream allows me to look at it whenever I want to. It doesn’t call for my attention whenever a message arrives, but I get to decide when I wish to give the message my attention. It allows me to pick up things that are important, and it also provides me easy ways to respond to on ore more people. And it lets me ramble my thoughts to whoever is willing to listen to them.

And we could easily integrate calling behavior in that same life stream too.

The iPone may be the best handheld mobile computer there is right now, but it’s probably one of the worst mobile phones I have ever used.

The usability of mobile phones could be so much better

A few days ago I realised (yet again) that the mobile phone could be made so much better. In such a way that the interface would start working for me as a user, instead of me having to work the interface of the phone (disclosure: I use a Nokia N95, but previous phones from Nokia, Samsung, SonyEricsson gave me very similar experiences). (Another disclosure: yeah, I’m one of those suckers that hasn’t got an iPhone).

It started when I wanted to SMS something to Twitter after I woke up. The following happened:

I pressed the icon for SMS. Started typing “twit” in the address field, the N95 understood Twitter and I could continue to write the actual SMS. Started typing “Woke up early this morning, about to go to the office”. The display showed “Wolf up das?”. Darn, wrong language set. Pressed options, arrow up, arrow up, arrow up, enter, arrow down and selected “English”. Then pressed c,c,c,c,c and started typing “e”, pressed * to change the word “Wolf”into “Woke” and continued the sentence. Had to change “in”into “go” and finished the sentence. Options, then send. After approximately 100 key presses I was able to send away my 53 character message. An overhead of almost 100%.

Next thing I did was get into my car and drive to the office. I decided to turn on the Twitter message stream to my mobile so that I could see who was doing what. So every few minutes I would get an SMS notification from Twitter. I’d pick up the phone, pressed new message and read it while driving. After reading the message I would immediately press options, arrow down, delete message,enter and then the big red button to get back to the main screen while I was still driving. I need to clean up Twitter SMSes immediately as they clutter my inbox way too much. On a typical drive of about 1 hour I get as many as 30-40 messages, and when there are a lot of people on-line even more.

Naturally I wanted to respond to a few Twitter messages, so while driving, I typed a few short messages to Twitter friends. It takes 7 presses to get the @ sign needed in Twitter. I had to switch 3 times back and forth between languages as I follow Dutch and English speaking Twitter friends. In the mean time I answered a few calls, and I got behind in reading the Twitter alerts who would come in during the calls. I ended up with some 10-15 unread Twitter alerts, not to mention the irritating signalling of the alerts during my call.

I wanted to check something on-line, so I fired up the web browser to go on-line. I needed to type in the web address, which is pretty lame to do while in the car. Took me a few minutes, then waited for the web site to appear, only to find out it was too big to see on my mobile display. So I ended up scrolling the site to reach a point where I needed to enter text for a search. Of course I was typing in the wrong language. Ended up wiping out a lot of pressed characters and entering them individually, with spaces between them, which I then erased again to prevent the phone from thinking for me. The Twitter alerts kept coming in.

By the timeI got to the office I was about 20 messages behind. It took me a lot of time deleting them (reading them too me too long). Twitter produces enough alerts to overflow my inbox. I finally switched off Twitter by sending an off message and then I could start work.

Later that day I wanted to check something on my weblog using my mobile phone. I fired up the web browser, tried to connect to a WiFi access point only to discover I didn’t have access. Reverting back to UMTS I typed in my web log address and waited for the content to appear. The site is too big for the screen so Nokia provides me with a cursor to scroll back and forth. This is not nearly as cool as the iPhone does it (you can zoom in/zoom out and move around with your fingers on a touch screen), but at least I can get to the place I wanted to look at. I tried to open and stream a video embedded in the weblog. The phone started a video player which was hopeful, but the video never showed. Unable to grasp why it didn’t work I pressed the big red button to get to teh main phone screen. I saw a nice sunset from my office window and decided to take a picture of it. I opened up the camera at the back of the phone and wanted to take a picture. I got a “not enough memory, please close other applications first” message. It took me a while to figure out that the Internet connection was still there and I needed to close that off explicitly. Closed the camera, and opened it again to activate it and finally took the picture. Luckily Shozu worked fine and I could upload the picture with one press to my Flickr account.

That very same day the phone froze up on me once, and resetted itself (nice). I used it for another 20-30 SMSes or so, browsed the web about 3 times more and finally drove home again.

So what is the moral of this story? Well, there are a few things I realised once I got home and started thinking about the experiences I had that day:

1. The average overhead in terms of user actions, button presses, menu choices etc. is on average anywhere between 50 and 100%
2. The inbox-outbox principle of the mobile phone for messaging is a real mess and is not capable of handling 50-100 messages a day without tremendous overhead for the user
3. Web browsing sucks. The screen is too small, entering data takes too much time, a lot of the content doesn’t display, and no matter how nice the interface is, browsing on a mobile phone screen just isn’t any good. No, not even on an iPhone, sorry.
4. Multi langual input is a pain. it takes a lot of switching between dictionaries to get it to work for me. Turning the dictionaries off doesn’t work either because then I have to press way too many buttons to type.
5. Multitasking on a mobile phone is nearly impossible. Try web browsing while receiving SMSes, phone calls, and trying to take a picture in between. The phone can’t cope with it.

There is actually one functionality for which the mobile phone is optimised. It works just fine for making and receiving calls! One could easily argue that I’m trying to do things on the phone that are not normal. But, I described a pretty average day for me as a mobile user. Yes, I use the phone in the car. I do all these things, and preferably in parallel. Have you watched (your own) kids lately. They multitask even more than I do. And they deal with the complexity, just as I do. Grow up and deal with it.

But that doesn’t mean that we should be satisfied with the product. It basically is not fit for the job. Most of the mobile OSes are based upon mimicking the desktop PC interface, which sucks. The inbox/outbox principle for messaging is as old as e-mail and is not fit for today’s messaging needs. The interfaces haven’t really radically improved. We have gotten more applications, more possible connections, and ultimately more complexity. The iPhone’s major improvement is the touch screen and some really cool UI inventions. But even with the iPhone trying to do the things I decribed earlier aren’t easy.

I have said it before, we really need people to start thinking out of the box when it comes to the mobile user interface. We need people that first think about what, how, and why people are using it during a typical day. And design a user interface that works for the user to get his things done, not the other way around. With Google Android on its way there lies an opportunity to do just that. Why? Because it is open (how open remains to be seen). If it can overcome the Mobile OS es the mobile phone manufacturers ship with it, then there is hope. We might get to see some great designers rethink the mobile interface and update it to support the multitasking, multicontent, multi messaging and browsing world most of its user are in right now. The usability of mobile phones could be made so much better.

Update: just saw that there is another discussion now about the iPhone producing a lot of data traffic. That could imply that its usability has improved over other types of mobile phones, allowing the users to access the Internet easier. At the same time iPhone users are mostly tech savvy, and capable of handling the complexity provided by mobile phones. But the iPhone, with all its incredible UI novelties is still based upon the idea of browsing the way we browse with a desktop. The browsing paradigm hasn’t changed, it has justgotten a better interface. We will have to wait and see if that is good enough. I doubt it. We haven’t seen a real revolution yet, just a fast improvement over something that was really bad in the first place.

Just a few wishes for 2008 (part 2)

In my first post in 2008 I said I would elaborate a bit about things I would like to see happen in 2008. My first wish for 2008 was to bring back freedom and responsibility to the user. The article can be found here but if you want a very short abstract, I said:

My first wish for 2008 is that Service Providers build business models on user value instead of walled garden free but ad-based business models. In doing this they should provide the user with excellent, easy to use, transparent, privacy controls where the default is always set by the standards of the user. This wish would provide us with 3 major changes: The service provider becomes a partner that can be trusted and that provides user value instead of walled gardens, the user gets his freedom, and the user becomes responsible for his own actions and data on the Internet.

I just read an article written by John Battelle that takes a similar angle. He says:

The problem is, no one seems ready to truly set the social graph free. Till now.

With one move, Facebook can change the face (sorry) of this debate by making it falling-down easy to export your social graph. And I predict that it will.

Why? Because I think in the end, Facebook will win based on the services it provides for that data. Set the data free, and it will come back to roost wherever it’s best used. And if Facebook doesn’t win that race, well, it’ll lose over time anyway. Such a move is entirely in line with the company’s nascent philosophy, and would be a massively popular move within the ouroborosphere (my name for all things Techmeme).

Compete on service, Facebook, it’s where the world is headed anyway!

Let’s move on to my next wishes for 2008.

 2. Redesign of the mobile UI and Web to make it really work for its user

I personally feel that accessing the web using my mobile sucks. The experience isn’t even close to the capabilities I have access to on a PC. I have written an article about this called “We need a revolution in mobile UI thinking”. A quote from that:

In my opinion we need a revolution in mobile phone UI thinking. A revolution that puts the user and his intentions central in user interface development. We need to understand what users do with their mobile phones. We shouldn’t be thinking in terms of releasing technical functionalities with nice graphical interfaces. We need to think in terms of the remote control of life, supporting the user in his interaction needs. If we let go of the current UI and browsing paradigms who knows what becomes possible. Let’s not rebuild the entire web to make it mobile, let’s not even come up with even better alternatives for the iPhone touch screen. Let’s first think about what the user wants to do with his phone, and then come up with an interface and a mobile web concept that supports his actions, regardless of the technology.

After I wrote that article I was asked what I felt about ovi by Nokia. It is difficult for me to really comment on that until I have actually used it, but a few things come to mind.

The thing I really dislike about it is the pay off they use, “ovi by Nokia, your door to our services”. What do you mean “our services”? My mobile phone is mine, it is my personal space, my remote control of life. I don’t want anyone to tell me what services to use. Ovi might look great, but if it isn’t truly open, forget it. I won’t be using it. I want to decide what services I access via any mobile interface. It needs an API so that anyone can build services on it.  It needs to be freed from any mobile hardware. If a mobile interface is to become successful, it better work on a lot of different handsets. Maybe Android might fill this in, but it remains to be seen. But most of all, we need to get out of the current mobile UI interface, It isn’t fit for our social communications needs.

          

(images taken from www.s60.com)

We are still using SMS, web browsing (screen too small, bandwidth/cost too high), and that darn inbox/outbox paradigm (ever tried to handle 100 or more SMSes, MMSes, e-mails  a day using that mechanism?). Old school thinking.

Microsoft just announced their version 7 of their Mobile platform. It uses a touchscreen,  like the iPhone does, as a main interface element but will also use motion gestures of the user as a UI interface element.It will be interesting to see if this will lead to better UI development, but For now I hear a lot of technological features, not user experiences. And, I still see the inbox/outbox appearing in the screen shots.

3. Human behavior as the basis for new service development

Innovation is so often triggered by technology. That is not a bad thing necessarily. Many great developments start with the application of new technologies. However, where a lot of these innovations fail is their ability to support human behavior. Technology needs to be used and needs to be useful. If it isn’t the case, then the role of human behavior hasn’t been taken in account thoroughly enough. There have been numerous new technological capabilities launched in 2007 with confusing names and propositions. Just look at a snapshot of the web 2.0 directory and tell me, which services do you know and actually use?

So often this is caused by people thinking they know what users want, but fail to simply engage with them to really understand human need. I call that observing social behavior though a fishbowl. It sounds so simple, yet is hard to do. At the same time, the reward for providing user value is very big.

The good thing about this is that it leads you away from a mediocre web business model that is currently being used in web 2.0 developments. Instead of thinking about locking in the customer, you need to think of providing him value (thus setting him free, big difference).

4. Let content exploration become an interactive adventure again

There is an enormous amount of content on the Internet. Way too much to handle. It becomes increasingly difficult to find the right content. To help us there are numerous sites that index and present the available content to us. But that doesn’t help either. If I want to find something which might interest me but I don’t  really know what it is I’m lost. I tried browsing sites like YouTube, but it doesn’t work for me. I could look at the most popular, best watched, highest rated video’s, simply browse on subject or whatever, but at the same time I feel the interface isn’t helping me to find what I want. I’m not the only one with that problem. Looking at the blogosphere there are many examples of a video traveling through many different blogs. Everyone is looking at or recommending the same cleverly launched video’s.

I think the overwhelming availability of content is one part of the problem. The rating mechanism’s every site uses is another (it helps us all look at the same things). But the third aspect of this problem is human laziness. We all want to be entertained, but we don’t really want to put in the effort to find great content. The reason for this is that it is actually quite boring to find content using the current sites and interfaces provided. The search for content needs to become an adventure again. We need to explore new worlds, and get excited by all of our personal findings. To do that, we need new ways of exploration, new interfaces to enter these large worlds.

I hope that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft will be paying a lot of attention into the work of Jonathan Harris. He has shown that the exploration of content can become exiting and adventurous.

Check out his universe demo to see what I mean by that. It is a new paradigm for browsing, and it is a powerful one. While you are at it, also take a look at some of his other projects. He has done some amazing and inspiring stuff.

5.  Let the web continue to be a place for inspiration

I read a lot of blogs, surf to different sites, communicate with family, friends and even total strangers. Why? Well, for one thing, interaction is what life is about. But another way of looking at it is that it helps me to find inspiration. Inspiration in life, work, blogging, anything really. There are so many smart and creative people out there. All you need to do is take the time to look around. I posted a few inspirational sources earlier here, but it is really just a modest list.

Enough for now. What are your wishes for 2008? Let me know? It would be interesting to compile them all together.

We need a revolution in Mobile UI thinking

A few days ago I was fiddling around with my mobile phone (a Nokia N95) and it occurred to me (yet again) that the current mobile phone user interface just doesn’t work for me. Yes, the screens have become much bigger, it has impressive functionalities, a camera which is almost as good as a regular digital camera, it has HSDPA, WiFi you name it. But it just doesn’t work. The mobile phone interface is a phone interface with some application extra’s. It isn’t really a USER centric interface.

Just take the most basic mobile functionality you can think of (no it is not calling), messaging. I have several (technical) options to send a message to another person. But the phone forces me to resolve the technical details. I have to think about whether I want to send an SMS, e-mail or MMS (yes, I am one of those users that actually use MMS). People will obviously SMS most of the time, but with our physical and Internet world becoming connected in so many ways this will not remain to be the obvious choice. Once I have made a choice I need to wade through several menu’s in order to enter the message content, select the receiver and finally send the message away. It gets worse when I receive messages. Not only do I have several different types of inboxes (SMS, e-mail, MMS), but the notification mechanisms really suck. An SMS or MMS alert draws all my attention away from the thing I was doing. E-mail isn’t noted at all. If you don’t think this is a problem I recommend you try out Twitter and get it to send your tweets to your mobile phone for an hour or so. You see instantly why this messaging mechanisms doesn’t work. It floods my inbox and it distracts me constantly. I have to perform too many actions to read all the messages and then delete them again.

Nokia and other manufacturers are constantly working on their user interface. But they are simply improving on an old concept. Wiht the increased graphics and computing power I hoped they would not improve, but thoroughly redesign the user interface. It isn’t a phone anymore. It is my remote control of life. It needs a user centric interface where not the mobile phone functionality takes the central place in design, but the way I want to use that functionality! I want freedom, instead of being trapped into a user interface that limits my options. But they haven’t. And that is one of the main reasons I think mobile Internet will not break through to the masses yet.

I haven’t mentioned the iPhone up to this point. I don’t own one and only played with it a few times so it wouldn’t be fair to draw conclusions about it based upon a few observations. I can say that based upon first impressions Apple has done a great job in providing us with a totally new UI element when they introduced the touch screen. They have put great effort into usability. But I can’t help but think that even on the iPhone, the UI paradigms haven’t been as disruptive as I would have liked them to be, even if it stimulates mobile internet usage.

Readwrite web reports today that the mobile phone penetration worldwide increases even more than predicted, with currently over 3.3 Bln mobile phone subscriptions. I’m not surprised at that. With more and more strong developing countries now being covered by mobile networks, people in China, India, Africa and South America people fall for the very same being connected trap we all fell for. The mobile phone makes it possible to connect and be connected whenever and where ever we want.

In the article Richard McManus points us to a recent study by Nielsen that reveals that 35% of US teens (8-12 yr) now own a mobile phone and that 5% sometimes uses it for Internet. Richard feels that this is enough evidence to show that the mobile Internet is finally ready to take off.

I’m not so sure about it. The breakthrough of mobile Internet has been predicted many times. But it isn’t there yet. The most important indicator to me that it isn’t there yet is the ever increasing SMS traffic. Why use such an outdated and cumbersome messaging protocol instead of using the possibilities the web has to offer? It isn’t just price, although that is a major barrier to be resolved. I think a lot has to do with usability. Sending an SMS has become easy for people to use (even with the flaws mentioned above). Firing up the Internet anywhere (and I don’t mean just in places near a WiFi point) isn’t simple. And once on-line we are limited within the technical barriers of the mobile phone. Browsing the web doesn’t work on such a small screen.

And instead of thinking about entirely new metaphores for mobile Internet we start moving around this issue and develop solutions that aren’t really solving the problem. One way is to redefine the ENTIRE web (yeah right), by creating special mobile pages. These pages are smaller, need less data transfer and are basically optimised for the mobile phone browser. While this might sound like a good solution it really doesn’t work. First of all, it would take an impossible effort to rebuild the entire web to make it usable for the mobile phone, and secondly, it leaves the user with the task of solving complexity. Do I go to www.flickr.com (which I can remember), or do I need to try m.flickr.com. And how do I upload my picture there?

Another option is to develop a touch screen and really cool zooming and moving around functionality to handle these big pages. Apple did just that with their iPhone. They are providing us with a intuitive solution to handle big amounts of data, but they aren’t fundamentally solving the problem.

In my opinion we need a revolution in mobile phone UI thinking. A revolution that puts the user and his intentions central in user interface development. We need to understand what users do with their mobile phones. We shouldn’t be thinking in terms of releasing technical functionalities with nice graphical interfaces. We need to think in terms of the remote control of life, supporting the user in his interaction needs. If we let go of the current UI and browsing paradigms who knows what becomes possible. Let’s not rebuild the entire web to make it mobile, let’s not even come up with even better alternatives for the iPhone touch screen. Let’s first think about what the user wants to do with his phone, and then come up with an interface and a mobile web concept that supports his actions, regardless of the technology.

I’ll give away one idea for making things better. Why not get rid of the whole inbox-outbox messaging paradigm. It sucks on a mobile phone. Instead convert the entire paradigm into a life stream, similar to the way Twitter and Jaiku work. It fits human behavior much better. We don’t always want to look into or respond to every message we receive. Showing these messages as a constant stream allows me to look at it whenever I want to. It doesn’t call for my attention whenever a message arrives, but I get to decide when I wish to give the message my attention. It allows me to pick up things that are important, and it also provides me easy ways to respond to on ore more people. And it lets me ramble my thoughts to whoever is willing to listen to them. Maybe I’ll ask Chris Messina to create some designs for this particular idea. He does a pretty cool job designing nice interfaces.

We need to let go of current paradigms, and ask ourselves, what is a user going to do with his phone in this social networking age?  It opens a new world of possibilites, a world without mobile web browsing, a world of freedom for the user. So who is going to free me from the limitations of the mobile phone and give me my remote control of life? Or maybe I should start something myself, anyone interested to join?

Advice to the record industry: go from distribution of music to distribution of emotions

Michael Arrington of TechCrunchs wrote an article just now on in which he talks about the CEO of Warner music admitting “we were wrong”:

We used to fool ourselves…We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.

Michael finds the admittance of the industry that they went to war with the consumer limiting his options is the most interesting.Obviously a war that cannot be won. Mathew Ingram his response to this is that Warner is getting religious 5 years too late.

What misses in all this retrospective analysis is the way to go forward. How should the music industry, and especially the major music distributors, change their business in order to survive and start creating value again. They are already past the Innovators dilemma. They have been going about their business not realising that resistance to change is futile.

But I don’t hear any answers from Warner Music to this dilemma. Ian Rogers from Yahoo Music wrote an emotional and so very true post on the previous 8 waisted years in the music industry. He will only invest in 2 things, consumer convenience, and reasons to experience the music. I think Ian does a brilliant analysis.

Thinking about this and looking back at some initiatives that drew my attention I thought it would be good to go into this a bit deeper. As usual, let’s try this from the consumer’s perspective.

People download music like crazy. Sometimes legal, but mostly using P2P technology (this has become such common practice, I wonder if we should just declare this legal, but this might be a thin line to anarchy) . There is definitely a subset of consumers willing to pay. They got to Amazons, iTunes, or deal directly with their favorite band. But most don’t, and the reason for it is obvious.

The transaction cost for music distribution has dropped to 0 with p2p technology and platforms like Facebook, Virb, MySpace etc . Where the music distributors used to provide value with distribution (thus getting payed for it), there is no value in distribution anymore. It took them 8 years to figure this out, and they haven’t got any answers to that yet.

The same argument holds for the band. Why use a record label if you can record, produce, and distribute your music yourself? Arguably this might be easier for a major band like Radiohead, but small bands do the same. And lets not forget that bands make their money now in the events they play and the merchandise that sells during these events. That is why the Radiohead move is excellent. They put the consumer/fan in the driver seat, making them responsible for paying for the music they download. This strengthens the emotional ties between the fan and the band, which will pay itself back via the concerts and the merchandise.

And it is here that lies the answer for the music industry in my opinion. They should stop thinking in terms of distributing music, and start thinking about distribution of emotions. Instead of alienating the bands and the fans from them, why not embrace them and become the platform of emotion distribution. There is a lot of revenues there.

And they have everything in place already. They have access to the bands, to the fans, to the content, to the merchandise. It’s all there, and all it takes is to let go of the single revenue stream they hold on to so tightly, and create a new emotions based revenue stream. And instead of fighting the fan who seems to be doing all these illegal things, embrace them, study their actions, and support them, thus locking them in again.

Having said all that here my 5 Ct’s on things they could do:

1. Have you looked at the video I linked in this post? I chose this one because it is a mash-up between “official” video material and a user adding his own music to it. People love to do this. Browse YouTube, and you will find millions of examples where people add video to music or add music to video. My first advise: stimulate fan interaction. Provide the fan with a platform in which he can access the music content and mash it up into something new and exciting. provide the fan with the platform that connects him to his favorite band and let him contribute to it. Can you imagine what happens if Warner would set this free for ALL their artists?
2. Focus on additional content. If the music is free, why not give it to the fan for free? But lock him in with additional merchandising stuff, exclusive pictures, video’s, tickets to live concerts, contests, live chats with the band, etc. And while you are at it, combine that with the excellent branding opportunities it provides. And make damn sure it is easy and convenient for the user.
3. Think interaction. People love to interact, and a fan is more than willing to pay for it. That is why they go to concerts and listen/sing along to the music. Add the mobile platform to this. Interact with the fan via SMS, and let him pay for the value it provides. Set up video walls at concerts where fans can be on during the performance with text, video, pictures. Do the same on the Internet. Let the fans meet up and interact.
4. How about providing the user easy ways to record and distribute his own music. We are talking on-line tools for recording and editing music. I am struggling my way through Cubase as an amateur musician, and although it is a powerful tool, it is also pretty complex. There are many user generated music distribution platforms out there, why not embrace them yourself?
5. Provide the music for free and across any platform the fan uses. Think iPod, think mobile phone, think stereo set at home, think computer, think p2p etc. Make distribution even more convenient than it already is, and make a living of the emotions.

The music distribution game is dead. Now that you know it, why not bury the hatch and start thinking consumer value again. You will not last in the distribution of music game. Move into the distribution of emotions. That is always the place where the money is!

The conversation never stops

If I would have to name one thing technology has brought us the past years it would be the ability to interact with each other. There are so many ways we can connect now that we almost need to hire a PA to manage all these connections. People love to interact. Without interaction life would be meaningless (probably why prisoners are sometimes locked into isolation). As interaction provides value, we should be looking at ways to monetize on that interaction (instead of monetizing on ads). The ability to interact is in my opinion the most important value driver for any service.

There are so many examples of interactions creating value. When writing this up I remembered a Harvard Business Review study about eBay. It turns out that people that joined the eBay community buy and sell more stuff on the eBay site, than people that are not part of the eBay community. Approximately 80.000 people were asked to join the eBay community, 3300 became active users, and 11.000 became lurkers. Revenues after one year of following these people increased up to 56% with eBay profiting several million dollars from the increased trading of both active community members and lurkers.

Or what about the study here, that tells us that in 2012 4,81 Bln mobile users will sent approximately 3,7 trillion SMS messages to each other, That is an average of 769 SMS messages per year, or 2,1 SMS messages per user per day, leading to $ 67 Bln SMS revenues. BTW, the largest mobile growth is to be expected in Asia.

Why do people love to watch video’s on YouTube or look at Facebook most of their time. In my opinion it is not the “sit back and watch” or “entertain me” behavior we all display when watching TV. I bet that every time we are at YouTube or Facebook it provides us with thoughts, ideas, memories or experiences that we can communicate about. It is this communication that makes the experience valuable. Sharing this crazy video with a friend and have a laugh about it. Looking at this dorky or very cool person on Facebook and talk about that with friends. We just can’t help ourselves. We need to communicate.

A recent study in Canada shows (again) that people that download music using peer 2 peer technology (in other words download illegally) buy more CD’s than people that don’t download music. Bands are now bypassing the “old”music distribution and distribute music themselves, even leaving the responsibility to pay for it with the user. Why does it work? Because it leads to interaction. Interaction between the band and its fans. Interaction between the fans, and interaction between the fan just downloading the music and his non-fan friend which he now tries to convince how incredibly cool this band is. Focusing on the interaction in music provides an experience that in itself will create value.

Why then, when people display such obvious needs to communicate, do web 2.0 business models not leverage this interaction directly? It is because the web enforces disjoint metrics upon us. Actually Google is probably largely responsible for this. Their PageRank has made us all into traffic slaves. When providing commercial services on-line it is all about having a high PageRank, about users being able to find your service and then view it. In order to be noticed, what better to do than provide cool services for free? But someone always has to pay the bill. And the way to do this, orchestrated by large media companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, is to create advertisement revenues. The metrics are easily manipulated leading to possibilities to fraud the system. Before you know it we are back into the advertisement bombarded TV world again. But advertisement does not increase the value of interaction. It doesn’t provide real value when two people are connecting (”this message was sponsored by..”). And people have found effective ways to get around it, using the remote control zapping away, or using DVD recorders to fast forward advertisement. On the Internet, most users will simply ignore ads, like a blind spot. This leaves only those that create massive amounts of traffic to their sites to actually earn some revenues in advertisement (there is always some fool clicking on an ad). I’m not naive, advertisement will always be there, but I don’t think it should rule our interactions.

The things is, people will interact, no matter what. Why not focus on increasing the value of the interaction itself. Let people pay for the interaction, instead of trying to monetize something on the side that doesn’t ad value to this interaction. It goes against all rules of web 2.0 business models. It might be a barrier for people to join a service when everything else is free. You are probably scaring of both investors and advertisers with this approach. But, if you provide real value to a user, and you are able to get that message to him, isn’t it worth a try? You know there is one piece of knowledge that supports you taking that disruptive step. The conversation never stops.

Short update:

Just after posting this I saw Tom Foremski posting a message that there is a growing distaste by VC firms of web 2.0 companies.

For example, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Silicon Valley’s leading VC firm, has stopped investing in Web 2.0 startups. “We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies,” says Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins. He mentioned this during an after dinner conversation last week. He said he had recently told John Battelle, one of the organizers of the rapidly growing Web 2.0 Summit conference, that the term no longer had the same positive cachet it once had. In the VC community it clearly has a negative one.

Sounds like we are perhaps on a turning point? Maybe this will trigger startups to step out of the usual business model and come up with exciting new services and equally exciting new revenue models.

Google’s assault plans on social networks

TechCrunch just posted an article in which they reveal that Google might be planning a “major assault” on the social networking scene.

I have written on the Google strategy before, and it seems that a lot of the things written down then are now becoming a reality. Google plans to open up all their applications, creating a social layer across all of them. But, in contradiction with Facebook, Google seems to have plans to open up the network two ways, not only allowing a user to us this layer across many different Google applications, but also across different social networks. It’s what many call “the web as a platform”. Scott Karp dismissed that term a while ago, quoting Google’s Jeff Huber:

A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform. So let’s go build the programmable Web.

This of course being a direct declaration of war on Facebook.

The most important asset according to Scott is data, and Google has plenty of it. Actually, I don’t really agree with Scott on this. Data is static, it is the application or usage of data that is important. It is not just about data, it is about interaction.

Google is definitely in a position to open up the social network space and even fill in some of my wishes to get out of the web 2.0 trap, I am wondering if they are going to make the right choices, especially when it comes to privacy. Google probably already knows everything there is to know about me, but can they handle my privacy as well?

And more importantly. Will they think user centric, or simply connect everything because technically they can create the APIs.

But my main interest will be on their plans of their mobile strategy. Opening up the web is one thing, being able to connect the web to the mobile space is much more interesting. That is where the money is. Through the mobile space we can get out of the web 2.0 advertisement trap and create working business models that are not based upon ad harassment.

Will Google understand this? They will, but as their business model is advertisement, I doubt they will fill it in the right (user centric) way.

10 ways to improve web 2.0 and move into an era of true interaction

I have expressed my opinions about the flaws in web 2.0 and how to correct them earlier and have gotten some very smart replies to that. I believe that in the end it is all about interaction between people. My interaction is my profile. It says more about me, about the things I find valuable, than anything I write in a profile (we all look better on Facebook than in real life right?). I also believe that current business models force service providers to put value into the network or application they build, instead of focusing on creating true user value.

In order to get out of the trap called web 2.0 we need to correct some flaws or perhaps (re-)invent some of the things to get to the point where interaction becomes the most important thing in any service. Having a need for a name for it I called it an Open Social Interaction Network, but I’m still open for anything better than that (let’s not call it web 3.0 please).

To deepen this discussion let me state my 10 personal wishes that in my opinion help us get out of web 2.0, where value seems to be put mostly into the network, into something that totally evolves around our interaction with others, thus providing value to YOU and ME:

1. I want to be able to export my friends and contact information to any other service I choose. Lets be real. The network does not OWN that data. It is mine. I have either taken the energy to find and add contacts to my friend list, have gotten it from them, or have typed them in myself. I want to be able to use that data anywhere I want. Why can I import all my data into a network, but they don’t provide me with an export function? Try it on Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Jaiku, Orkut. They are all willing to import my Outlook or Gmail contacts, but none provide me easy options to export my contacts from their service to another. Of course I am bound to privacy rules set by myself or my friends (if they don’t want me to export, I won’t)
2. Export my (multimedia) content to any other service I choose. Heck, if I want to burn a CD of all content I got or sent I can’t even do it. Twitter and Jaiki work with feeds, but Facebook doesn’t? Well, they are happy to import feeds, but I can’t export Facebook activity or content out of the network. Same goes for pictures, videos and any other content that I have kept, or that has been sent to me.
3. I have friends and contacts on many different networks. I want a lifestream service that allows me to see all of their activity regardless of the network and vice versa
4. In relation to point 3, I want to be able to message any of my contacts, without having to go to a specific network. In other words, if I know (or even don’t know) that my friend is on Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and a few other networks I want to be able to send 1 message that is delivered smartly to my friend, without me having to think which service to use. Of course, if I want to, I can make that choice in a simple and intuitive way. And equally, my friend Joe can set his preferences the way he wants to receive incoming messages.
5. In relation to point 4. I want to have presence information available over all networks. That will help me interact more efficiently with my friends. So if I know that my friend Joe is on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiku, Gmail, and I can see where he hangs out at the moment I might make an intelligent decision on how to contact him, or what I am sending over
6. I want to be able to write or publish content to multiple platforms in one action. So, if I write a blog entry on my blog I might also want to publish it on Facebook or MySpace, have a tinyurl published in Twitter and send a few friends an e-mail or SMS about it
7. In relation to point 6. If I get the same entry across multiple networks or platforms that’s hardly efficient. So some intelligence to make sure I get the message on the most convenient way would be nice (how about retracting all forms after I read one? So if I see a picture from a friend on Facebook, then I probably don’t need a twitter tinyurl or Flickr link anymore)
8. I want to be able to follow interesting topics regardless of where the conversation is taking place. I have a tracking facility on Google Reader, Twitter and many other platform. Let’s integrate them so that I can follow ALL conversation on that specific topic (if I really want to)
9. I want to be “on”as soon as I am connecting to the world. What do I mean by that? I want to integrate point 1-8 in my browsing experience. Not just widgets on a desktop, not just a unifying portal that I need to go to. No, when I connect to the world, it should be there with me, available when I call for it. It requires that I will be able to login automatically to any network I am part of. OpenID or anything that looks like it should be available as a standard. And personally, I would like to integrate it all into my browser so that I can explore and interact at the same time (DISCLAIMER HERE: I am involved in a (currently stealth) project that integrates cool interaction services into your web browser (more on that some other time) so I am positively biased to such solutions. Current integration on the web (take NetVibes or Facebook as examples) is not sufficient as they are essentially destination based making the destination more important than myself. And needless to say that if I am on the move I want to be connected using my mobile.
10. I want excellent and easy to use privacy controls to go with points 1-9, allowing me to set both general privacy measures as well as per item or message control.

So how about it? Am I on the right track here or do you feel its all nonsense? Do you have other wishes? Are there services that already do what I want (and I simply have missed it?). I’m interested to hear what it is you want out of next generation services.

Anyone care to implement some of this ?

Ad supported mobile phones will never work!

Just saw an announcement that MySpace will launch an ad supported mobile phone here and here. Other initiatives are rising from Fox (Foxsport), Photobucket etc.

Forget about it. I personally don’t think it will work anytime soon. Why? Because the mobile phone has become a lifestyle object. It represents our personal individuality. It is used as a personal remote control to our lives. I doubt that there would be many people letting their private space be invaded by ads in that manner. Sure, there will be more ads when mobile Internet is introduced. But I’m not showing of my free MySpace mobile to my friends (loser!). And lets face it. Competition is so high now that the mobile phone rates are dropping fast. I don’t need or want the add scheme to get a free mobile.

Mobile Internet will become the next hit (but not yet)

I have been wondering why the promise of Mobile Internet has not been fulfilled yet, while at the same time new startups are popping up to get into this (very lucrative) market. Don’t get me wrong, the number of mobile Internet users is growing steadily, but I am more looking at it from a mass adoption point of view. There are loads of people trying it out, but far less use it on a regular basis in their (mobile) lives. There has already been published a lot about this topic. Michael Arrington just wrote a nice article on mobile social networking on TechCrunch. I think there are several major inhibitors for a massive breakthrough:

1. There aren’t that many really useful services that really enforce mobile Internet into the lives of mobile users. Yes there are many “cool” services around, but let’s face it. Most of these services are used by techies (nothing wrong with that btw), or obtain a lot of media attention because of the technologies used. I don’t think there are many mobile Internet services that appeal to the mass yet. Yeah, location based services are cool, but I am not so sure if it is the user that finds it useful , or the startup that provides the service. It seems to wear off after the initial excitement. And I can’t help to notice that children in the age of my oldest daughter (yes, they all have a mobile phone) have an intuitive grasp where their friends hang out. SMS is much more functional to them for now, but who knows. Physical dating still rules over virtual dating.
2. Mobile devices don’t deliver technically yet what is needed. I use a Nokia N95. I am perfectly happy with it, but if I ask my wife or any of my friends to go to the Internet with it, they probably won’t accomplish it without at least some help. Come to think of it, this is as much a UI issue. I do think that the Apple iPhone is a real step forward here.
3. The mobile Internet interface is not nearly as flexible, intuitive and usable as the Internet browser and a mouse is on a PC. There is the problem of small screens that cannot display enough content and provide the same user experience that a user is already accustomed to using a PC screen (19 inch or higher nowadays). Inputting information remains a hassle unless you have a keyboard. The downloading or uploading of content is still slow and difficult to do, although I can’t complain too much about speed when near a Wifi or HSDPA signal
4. The cost is high for a large adoption in the market. You need high end (expensive) handsets like the Nokia N95 or Apple iPhone and transferring data is still pretty expensive. See this nice article earlier this year by Guy Anker on the subject.
5. And last but not least. I think there might be a psychological barrier for users to download all kinds of new applications onto their mobile phone. It is the most personal device for any user and they won’t put any software on it unless the source is trusted by the user

Users really need a compelling reason to start integrating mobile Internet usage into their regular patterns. Unless the industry starts addressing all the issues above it Will still be a long and slow growth path.

My personal opinion is that the real mass adaptation will start from the Internet, not on the mobile phone. Start with adding simple mobile services to the most successful Internet services. Help the user with the first steps onto the mobile Internet by services like up/downloading of messages/pictures to the Internet and phone and forwarding them to their friends. I can’t wait to get my hands on simple mobile sharing services to enrich the SMS experience with audio, video and pictures. Then, gradually increase the functionalities to contain browsing, search, location based services and social networking capabilities.

What do you think? Am I being too pessimistic here? Have some of these barriers been resolved already, have I missed any? Are there examples where mass adoption is already taking place (outside of Japan!)?