Punktilio Digital • Blog

“Web Is Dead”

September 14th, 2010

categories: discussions,facebook,foursquare,native apps,web apps

Tags: Google Me,native apps,social media,web apps

A recent study and lovely infographic by Wired shows that the internet is accessed mainly through Apps, which makes sense as a lot of people access the web via Apps and Mobile Platforms. As it says in the article:

“You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service.”

Yes, I know there’s no Netflix over here but you get the point. So with more and more people owning Smartphones and accessing the Web from there are Native apps here to stay or will Web eventually win the day? It depends which tribe you belong to; To get best usage out of your iPhone Apple recommend you plug in and sync your phone as often as possible, Blackberry go for a more backup your phone every now and again type system, whereas Google and their Android platform are working towards a completely Cloud-based smartphone.

With the release of Apple’s controversial social music platform Ping they’re hoping that it will stay native, as without Native apps and without the App Store, Apple definitely wouldn’t be making as much moolah. Whereas Google are betting their Facebook Credits on the future being Cloud-based Web Apps, with rumours even hinting at a Google music download service. Blackberry seem to be happy to sit this one out with an attitude that kind of says ‘leave the trendy kids to fight over new fads, we know we do phones and email very well, that’s all our customer base need.’

Which seems to go hand-in-hand with MG Siegler‘s opinion, a blogger at TechCrunch. He argues that “..the best indicator of who I actually interact with socially the most in real life are the calls I make and the texts I send — it’s all mobile interaction.”.

Aka Aki - a particularly successful social platform in Berlin is currently basking in the uptake of mobile web as the preferred way for people to connect. Based on GPS and Bluetooth (remember that?), the service aims to connect friends, and friends of friends when they are within the close vicinity of each other. The success of this and continuing growth of Foursquare, Gowalla, and the addition of Facebook Places seems to suggest the next progression to be a localising of personal Social Graphs.

**UPDATE**

Google Me Confirmed for Autumn release.

“Eric Schmidt has confirmed that we will getting “Google Me” sometime this Fall. This Google Me service will introduce what Google calls “a social layer” into online search, video and Google Maps.”

/Via ZDNet

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Placebook (Oh and a bit about the Tabs)

August 24th, 2010

categories: applications,facebook,foursquare,social media,twitter

Tags: facebook,foursquare,Gowalla,Places,Spambook,Tabs

This week Facebook are rolling out their reduced Tab size change, which was originally mentioned last October. So make sure all of your custom Tabs and Apps are resized from 760 to 520 pixels otherwise you’ll be seeing the dreaded ‘broken’ icon.

More information can be found here. / Via InsideFacebook

So, a week after the launch of Facebook Places and what are your thoughts on it? Oh that’s right, it’s only had a US launch so you probably don’t have any first hand experience of it (unless you are Mark Zuckerberg or some other Facebook employee!). One particular luxury we have over here is we can sit back and watch with a reserved caution as others figure out the underlying privacy issues… Or get some good ideas on how to prank friends!

Dennis Crowley, owner of Foursquare doesn’t seem scared by the new competition, telling The Telegraph “I have now had a chance to play around with Facebook Places and it’s not that great or interesting. It’s a pretty boring service, with barely any incentives for users to keep coming back and telling their friends where they are.” He continues “The only interesting thing about Places is that it has a potential audience of over 500 million people around the world… but that can only be a good thing for location-based services, like Foursquare, as Facebook will educate the masses about check-ins.”

The introduction of Places seems to be working in contrast of Facebook’s push to monetise the platform by opening it up to marketers. We use Facebook for all of our clients. The way you can specifically target users based on the information they share makes it a platform that is second to none. But it is this that irks somewhat; with Places people don’t want to share where they are, or where their ‘friends’ say they are broadcast by default to ‘everyone’.

Facebook (well for me, personally) used to be somewhere my actual friends and I could chat online and share links, videos, events etc. Then school friends who I’d not been in touch with (or since) began using the platform and ‘Friend Requesting’ me, and it felt rude not to ‘Accept’ all of them. I realise I may be sounding a bit like a Grumpy Old Man and having contrary views to a company from progressing and growing but Facebook became a lot more open and a lot less personal. That was just the start. Facebook have 500 million+ users, I can’t imagine all of those users are completely web-savvy. Now people become some kind of Facebook celebrities with 1000+ ‘Friends’, reminiscent of the days of MySpace when it was common culture to friend collect. Imagine introducing Places to MySpace. It’s a thought TechCrunch made a whole lot more eloquently in a recent article. Would you feel comfortable sharing that much information with virtual/actual strangers by default? Is it time for Facebook to re-think their Social Graph? Should it introduce a friend tier, its own version of Followers/Following option?

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