Has Twitter crossed the chasm?

Image by Matt Hamm via Flickr

When I came across Twitter about an year back, I was bewildered. So I can put 140 characters on a web site to tell the world what I am doing at the moment… Who cares? And why would I want to know what others happen to be doing at the exact moment they decide to share it with the world? However, there were quite a few people using Twitter so I decided to investigate Why we tweet and discovered it’s quite valuable both personally and for business. Ever since I have been an avid twitterer.

But something changed recently… all of sudden Twitter exploded in the mainstream, it even made it to the cover of TIME. Everyone from kids to businesses to politicians to governments are twittering. A few examples:

• Governator Arnold (@Schwarzenegger) twittered about an emergency plane landing. Not only did he tweet, but he took a photo of his plane and sent that out too
• Al Gore gets a million followers
• It played a big role in the overwhelming coverage of the #IranElection
• Dell took news confernence questions via Twitter
• The Israeli Consulate out of New York participated in a “citizen’s press conference” using Twitter

More often than not, Twitter is breaking the big story. Much like Youtube became the way to share video, Twitter is quickly becoming our open public wire service.

Twitter is beginning to change the way we communicate through crowd sourcing. By being connected and transparent we can get a sense of how humanity is feeling, thinking, and experiencing our world. It is only a matter of time before Tweeting is as well-known as Googling.

The trigger

I believe it started with Ashton Kutcher publicly challenging CNN to become the first to get a million followers on twitter. CNN of course obliged, thinking they’d use their media muscle to get viewers to follow them to victory. But Ashton had an ace up his sleeve, he went on The Oprah Winfrey Show to evangelise twitter, and as expected, got America’s moms to help him gallop across the finish line well before CNN. The drama during, and after these events, ensured wallpaper coverage in the US media and it wasn’t long before everyone in the US was hooked, with the rest of the world playing catch up.

Do you think Twitter has crossed the chasm?

New to twitter? Here’s a tip; answer “what’s important to me” instead of “what am i doing” – Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang)

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Convergence of Terrestrial and Satellite mobile communication systems

Mobile Satellite Services

Mobile Satellite Services like Iridium and GlobalStar have a long established reputation of being able to successfully deliver connectivity to the most remote regions of the planet. Unlike traditional mobile phone providers that utilize cell towers for signal strength, satellite phone providers connect to low earth orbiting satellites. These orbiting satellites enable satellite phone service to connect in seconds with a clear signal. So, if you are hiking, cruising or otherwise travelling in a remote area, and need to stay in touch, the satellite phone works best. Only about 14% of the whole world is out of cover.

However, to make a call, you may have to go outside, for you’ll often find they don’t work very well under a roof of any kind. And, the handsets are large and clunky with big ugly antennaes.

Terrestrial mobile networks

Using cell towers, terrestrial mobile networks provide very good coverage in focused locations, however we all despise the “out of coverage area” message we keep getting every now and then.

There has been no good solution for people who were working on the fringes of cellular networks, crossing in and out of coverage areas. Or, those who want to be able to use thier phones when sailing, on hiking trips or vacationing in remote locations.

Integrated satellite-terrestrial Mobile Service

Enter TerreStar. They have come up with an integrated satellite-terrestrial mobile satellite service to be lauched in June this year. This service will enable users across North America to be connected to TerreStar’s network through a “virtual handshake” between the next-generation mobile satellite and UMTS (3G, upgradeable to LTE) terrestrial network. It’s the only fully IP-based satellite phone using high-speed packet data.

Terrestar has come up with a cute and compact device. It sports an internal antenna, touch screen, a full QWERTY keyboard and runs Windows Mobile 6.5. It has satellite, quad-band GSM, tri-band WCDMA/HSPA connectivity along with Bluetooth and WiFi. The device will retail at about $800 USD. It’s the first satellite-terrestrial smartphone with planned service offerings, including: SMS, MMS, IM, Email, Push to Talk, Video services and Location Based Services (LBS).

How they do it

TerreStar will be using a geostationary satellite employing ground-based beam forming technology, a critical element in the system to deliver speed and performance to handheld devices with small, even internal, antennas. In the case of Iridium, a constellation of LEO (low earth orbiting) satellites are used to provide global, but much lower speed and signal strength, coverage.

Sam Churchill of Daily Wireless explains

L-band Mobile-Satellite Service (like that of Iridium and GlobalStar) uses 1525–1559 MHz (Space-to-Earth) and 1626.5–1660.5 MHz (Earth-to-space) while the 2 GHz Mobile-Satellite Service (used by some geosynchrous satellites) uses 2000–2020 MHz: (Earth-to-space) and 2180–2200 (Space-to-Earth).

The techniques developed and patented by Mobile Satellite Ventures (a sister operation of TerreStar) allow the same (MSS) frequency band to be used for both satellite and terrestrial communications seamlessly, yielding simplified single-band/single-mode transparent user devices 

Conclusion

I think it’s a great step forward which will have a profound impact in our lives.

Some of-the-top use cases

• Extention of cellular networks to rural, remote and maritime environments
• Provide mobile users at land, at sea and in the air with ubiquotous multimedia services (Internet, phone, entertainment)
• Always-on mode of communication in Crisis/Disaster areas

Photo sharing: Facebook leads Flickr by a long margin

Flickr had been the leading Photo sharing site for quite a while but off late it’s been trumped by Facebook. Flickr adds about 3 million photos every day as opposed to Facebook which adds around 30 million photos every day. Social networks, it seems have come up as preferred locations for sharing photos as opposed to the photo sharing services.

Facebook Photos saw over 153 million uniques in Jan '09, while #2 Flickr saw only 66.7 million

Stan Schroeder of Mashable explains

Flickr has many additional features, and the images can be bigger, but ultimately people use Facebook for the same thing – sharing photos with their friends. Add to that the fact that photo management on Facebook is very elegantly done, with some simple editing options such as rotating and tagging added into the mix, and you’ve got yourself a nice, large photo sharing site for not-too-demanding users – and all your friends are already using it

I’d say it makes perfect sense. You’d like to share those moments with your friends, and they’re already there on social networks… why bother with an additional service… so I guess Youtube is next.

What do you think?

What makes a mobile phone tick?

Isn’t this the million dollar question… although there are no straight answers, here are two important factors to consider while designing phones (or any product for that matter)

• Ensure the phone’s features are integrated with each other while maintaining ease of use in a meaningful way. It’s not about cramming more features, it’s about making those features work together to support a lifestyle. The buying decision comes down to the buyer’s perceived expectation of how well the phone will fulfill certain tasks. In other words, how well does a phone fit into the life of a consumer?

• Buying decisions are mostly driven by emotions, and we then use our intellect to add reasons and defend our emotional decision. Finding out these emotions is very important.

Carnival of the Mobilists #162

Welcome to the 162th edition of the Carnival, hosted for the first time here at Technology, Mobility, Usability and other Musings.

This has been a busy week for mobilists thanks to Mobile World Congress that concluded recently. Surprisingly, not many posts covering MWC have come up, I guess we’ll see them next week after people have had some time to put their thoughts together.

This has been a varied week covering a range of topics. So, let us begin, shall we?

Market Watch

From Communities Dominate Brands, Tomi talks about 3G penetration statistics marking a trend that indicates 3G’s success in any region it’s launched in.

Thomas Menguy of Vision Mobile looks at three hardware related Nokia PR at MWC and shows how those announcements fits within the new Nokia strategy.

Barbara Ballard over at Little Springs Design looks at device developments at MWC indicating a strong focus on Touch. I completely agree with her insights about the Touch interface. Touch is sexy, she muses, provides some nice interaction possibilities. It also shuts down some interaction possibilities. And makes other stuff harder.

Challenges for new mobile technology

Steven from Little Springs Design talks about challenges for emerging mobile technology, biggest one being the delay between getting a new technology to market and getting it well-adopted. I nominate this as my Post of the Week.

Designing for Mobile

Bookmarking sites on mobile is a big issue. James Cooper of mjelly gives a couple of examples of sites using a new approach to encourage users to bookmark them.

Aaron Chua highlights three shortcomings of current mobile ebook applications and gives suggestions on how to overcome them.

Holly from mobienthusiast talks about Sonic Mobile as a good example of a well-designed mobile site.

m-learning

Mark Hooft at his Ubiquitous Thoughts gives a great roundup of Mobile Learning 2009 Conference.

Pics from MWC

Lastly, mtrends founder Rudy De Waele posts pics of events in Barcelona, check it out if you’d like to see the faces behind the many mobilists around.

On Rudy’s behalf, I would like invite all mobilists and participants who have pictures of the Mobile Peer Awards event to join the Flickr Group and upload their pictures too – http://www.flickr.com/groups/mobilepeerawards/ Anyone can join!

Next Week

That’s it for this week folks, hope you’ve enjoyed it. Head over to GoldenSwamp for next week’s roundup of the best in mobile blogging.

2009 Bad Usability Calendar

A quick post. 2009 Bad Usability Calendar is a one-page ebook that captures 12 usability mistakes on a single page. Must read for anyone desiging products.

Users can’t predict what features they “need”

Product Managers often turn to gathering requirements about their product by talking to the customers, asking them what their requirements are. Talking to internal stakeholders like sales, marketing etc and drawing up a list of features. Sounds like a great process to go about designing a product or feature, just one problem… Users don’t know what they want until they see what they get.

People didn’t know what features they needed in an iPhone. They just needed to be able to do some things like: staying in contact with friends, checking your favorite websites, want a phone that is easy to understand, knowing upfront how much it’s going to cost to use the phone etc

In an interview, Maryam Mohit, the guy responsible for online customer experience at Amazon talks about how the collaborative filtering navigation mechanism for book recommendations on Amazon.com was inspired by users, but didn’t come directly from their comments

“It’s a combination of listening really hard to customers, and innovating on their behalf. For example, quite awhile ago we developed the “similarities” feature – the one that says “people who bought this also bought that.” In focus groups, no customer ever specifically requested that feature. But if you listened to customers talk about how they buy things, they’d say, my friend bought this, and I like what they like. In other words, they get recommendations from people they trust. There was a cognitive leap, based on those comments, to realizing that we could create something like that based on the data we had. That’s an example where there was a need expressed by customers, but the innovation was taking that general need and making the leap to a technology that meets that need in a new way.”

What’s really needed is to identify the unmet needs and gaining insight into customer’s real problems. We can’t accomplish this by asking them what they want but observing them over a period of time, figuring out what they’re struggling with, gain insights into their deep-seated desires and innovate on their behalf.

Note: No one said it was easy

Carnival of the Mobilists #150

Head over to this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists at Mippin Blog for some of the finest in mobile blogging. Couple of the interesting topics covered this week: Femtocells, mobile broadband, mobile app stores and my own entry on the big shift to touchscreen and how it’ll impact the regular keypad.

Firefox brings its biggest strength to its mobile browser… Extensions

The great thing about extensions is that they allow you to customize your browsing experience to suit your particular needs. What it really brings to the table for the browser is an ecosystem of developers and users around it, giving it an edge which is extremely difficult to counter. This is what made it the biggest strength that Firefox had over Internet Explorer.

Fennec Logo

Now we’ve seen with the success of Firefox and iPhone App Store how important an ecosystem really is to a product. And now, Firefox brings it’s biggest strength to mobile with Fennec (mobile version of Firefox).

The first extension to be released for Fennec is URL Fixer, a handy tool that corrects typos in URLs typed in the address bar.

Just as in PC, extensions will be a killer feature for Fennec. This is bad news for current players in the market because you can counter Tabbed Browsing, Search Integration, Spell Checking, Session Restore, RSS Feeds blah, blah, blah etc; but it’s very difficult to counter an ecosystem. And that too a real big one, because Fennec will be leveraging an already flourishing ecosystem on the PC.

What extensions would you like to see in a mobile browser?

Touch screen on mobiles is the new black, but will it overshadow the keypad

 

iPhone’s success has sent all the handset manufacturer’s scurrying to come up with a touch screen device of their own. We have seen touch screen devices being launched by all major players, even RIM which is mostly in the enterprise segment has come up with one. This makes good short-term commercial sense, but I wonder if it points to a trend that’ll overshadow the keypad.

Touch screen definitely has it’s advantages, you save space for the keyboard (which takes up a large percentage of the device area), you can change the complete interface for each app and provide the necessary keys and buttons only, you can save weight and due to no keyboard there are no mechanical wear parts.

That said, let’s look at iPhone’s keypad for a second, it’s not really what we were hoping for. It is so harder and longer to develop a response from the iPhone.. you keep wanting “k” but it gives “i” or some key closer to the letter and this goes for any letter. Doing the same thing on the Blackberry, however, is a breeze.

As Dr Buxton puts it: “Everything is best for something, and worst for something else.” Touch screens are best suited to manipulating information, rather than inputting it in the first place—an area in which keypads remain unchallenged. Mobiles with keypads and touch screens could offer the most flexibility, letting users choose the appropriate input method for each task. Google designers have done a great job in this regard, the G1 is strictly touch screen and has a built in keyboard that slides out.

I think touch screens are here to stay, but it’ll be a while before they overshadow the keypads.

 

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