The dawn of the electronic social age is upon us.  It exploded with PC-based Internet, but you may question, where is it headed next?  Mobile phones have gained mass-adoption by most demographics, but they have yet to really change the way that we engage in social networking.  They primarily exist today as a means to enhance one’s existing social network as a communication medium.

But with iPhone 3G set to be released tomorrow, everything poised to change.

With the launch of the iPhone Application Developer Platform, individual developers now have the capability to rapidly develop innovative applications that take advantage of all the iPhone’s features.  Now anyone with some spare time can easily come up with creative applications that leverage the iPhone’s location-based GPS features and high-speed internet connection.  The possiblities are endless.  Want to chat to the crowd in a 100-meter radius at a concert?  Want to check out the profiles of all the hot girls in the bar on your iPhone so you can go on a directed attack? (ok, that one’s pretty lame, but you get my point)

What makes this application platform even more powerful is that individual developers now have a powerful marketing and sales channel, the iPhone Store, to distribute their applications to the millions of iPhone consumers worldwide.  Think Facebook Applications, but for the iPhone.  It’s a win-win situation for both Apple and the developers, as Apple stands to leverage developers world-wide to build vast quantities of innovative applications to enhance the value of the iPhone.  At the same time, developers have a channel to distribute their applications with a direct incentive to develop applications by earning either revenue for downloads or indirect monetary benefits (advertising, social graph, etc.) with no-charge applications.

But who is the big winner amongst it all?  Of course – the consumer.  We’ll now have a very valuable social tool for bringing our social networking capabilities to a new dimension.  With tens of thousands of developers around the world building their own unique and creative applications to get a slice of Apple’s pie, there are bound to be must-have applications created that change the way we live and communicate.

I would surmise that the iPhone 3G and it’s application platform will do for social networking what Netscape and the browser did for the worldwide web.  Social networking was not meant to take place sitting in front of a computer all day.  It needs to evolve to areas and events where you actually socialize, and can leverage mobile technology to enhance your social connections.  The iPhone 3G is ushering in this new era.

Why am I so confident?  Apple is cool, Apple is trendy; the product, interface, and design are all best in class; they have the commercial channel; they have the price that will drive mass adoption ($199); and best of all, they have the vision of how a consumer is meant to leverage their mobile device to enhance their daily lives.

And the commercial platform for developers now provides them instant access to bring the utility of the iPhone to new heights.  Applications can be discovered, distributed, updated and shared with one touch.

And ground zero breaks tomorrow, folks.  It will be an exciting time to watch it all unfold.

Tags: Apple, Applications, Social Network by Tim McKillican
1 Comment »

If there was any doubt about the new development paradigm that Facebook ushered in last summer with the launch of the Facebook Application Platform, all dissent was crushed this week with Apple’s launch of the iPhone SDK and MySpace’s recent launch of their own application development platform. With these recent announcements, the viability of allowing individual developers free reign on proprietary platforms was significantly strengthened.

While individual developers have always had creative ideas and innovations, they historically lacked a channel by which to bring their creations to the masses in an easy and efficient manner. With the floodgates now opened, individual developers and small teams from around the world can now develop innovative applications in just days/weeks and then leverage these channels to gain a mass following sometimes even hours after launch. You no longer must be working for a global development company with footprint in major retail chains or a large online marketing presence to market your wares. The opportunities for creation and distribution are now easily at the fingertips of any aspiring developer. It certainly is an exciting time for both these developers, as well as consumers, who will reap the benefits of all these new innovations.

But there’s always a catch, right? With everyone and their dog having access to these new channels, consumers are going to be overwhelmed with choice and bombarded with new applications left and right (as if I need to allude to the problems that Facebook has had with controlling the spam around applications). What application developers must do to really establish a quality and loyal user-base and wade through the influx of applications is to create applications that deliver immediate benefits (since modern Internet users generally have the attention span of a 5-year old) while providing real and lasting value to consumers.

Tags: Apple, Facebook, Marketing, MySpace, Social Network by Tim McKillican
No Comments »