When will Facebook give us an iPhone app that does something remarkable? Here’s one idea.
September 4th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Last week, Facebook released the latest iteration of their popular iPhone app. While the user experience is significantly improved, the Facebook app sadly remains little more than a miniaturized version of the Facebook website. This “lazy” approach to mobile app development certainly isn’t unique to Facebook. iTunes is littered with apps that merely mimic consumer websites, thus failing to offer brand experiences particular to the iPhone and its unique modes of use. (One notable exception is the Amazon iPhone app, which offers Amazon Remembers, an assisted shopping service specifically designed for mobility and iPhone functionality.)
What’s perhaps most disappointing about Facebook’s approach is that they have been slow to develop new services that take advantage of the wealth of in situ user-reported data about our activities, moods, and behaviors.
Consider Facebook’s now dominant role as a photo-sharing site. At its busiest, Facebook loads 550,000 photos each second, and you can assume that a fair share of these photos are uploaded or viewed via Facebook’s apps for smartphones. Now consider the metadata associated with these photos: The user’s GPS location, compass orientation, the time and date the photo was taken, whom else is present (via photo friend tags), and associated captions and concurrent status updates that provide some semantic cues as to what the photo literally and emotionally represents to the end user.
Get the picture?
The Facebook mobile app, and more specifically, the Facebook iPhone app is a powerful generative platform for an entire range of new services that Facebook could (and frankly, should) offer.
Imagine using Facebook’s deep archive of profile data and in situ metadata to find places and events around town that fit your desires at a moment’s notice. Imagine having the ability to automatically view photos from your profile and the profiles of friends associated with a given location, time, or mood (“Placebooks,” anyone?).
To show you what this might look like, here is a very preliminary Facebook mobile app concept called “Sugar” I developed with two of my colleagues from the Institute of Design:
So where is mobile social networking heading? And what may lie ahead for Facebook?
Loopt, a location-based social network certainly grasps the power of in situ real-time user data and has recently begun offering “always on” service for users, allowing them to be alerted of the activity of nearby friends. While it is yet to be seen whether this type of service will achieve wide-scale adoption, it is an indication of what Facebook should be considering in future iterations of its mobile app (with the proper privacy features, of course). And to be fair, it seems Facebook may already be exploring such an idea with Nokia.
Mobile is the future of Facebook. When will Facebook begin to fully grasp this?
Preservation of unintended use
August 30th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
At last, a part of Chicago’s epic parking meter failure I can actually agree with. That is, assuming city officials . . . er, Morgan Stanley actually had anything to do with this.
Is small the big idea?
July 18th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
In Gareth Kay’s most recent op-ed for Agency Spy, he espouses the pursuit of smaller, more useful and socially conscious ideas in contrast to our current obsession with chasing big, spectacular awareness-driving ideas. He writes:
Now clearly spectacle has been a powerful force in culture over time, but it’s one type of execution and a type that feels increasingly at odds with a more intimate and invisible culture. We’re getting better but we’re still not very good as an industry at celebrating small, relatively invisible things but increasingly these are the ideas (think Nike+, Fiat Ecodrive, even iTunes and the Obama campaign) that are driving culture, that seem to thrive in an increasingly digital world and are able to change behavior.
Kay goes on to laud BakerTweet, a Twitter-based service developed by the smart folks at Poke as an example of a powerful small idea:
[Vimeo=http://vimeo.com/3972081]
While I agree with Kay in that our obsession with spectacle can be a distraction from truly useful, behavior-changing ideas, it’s really not BIG ideas nor small ideas that are the issue here: It’s smart, platform-based innovation. BakerTweet is indeed a smart little idea that provides a convenient little service. But it’s real power lies in the fact that it is proof-of-concept for a whole platform of simple Twitter appliance-based innovations. Bakers can turn a nob and press a button to effortlessly tell the world what’s coming out of their ovens. Wouldn’t it be nice if your local Secretary of State facility could do the same to tweet line waiting times? One can imagine a variety of labor-intensive, time-sensitive service scenarios that could benefit from a computer-free relatively hands-off Twitter appliance. Ah, the joys of an open API combined with little electronics prototyping platforms like Arduino.
So what I’m proposing is that ideas like BakerTweet may seem small to advertising folks because we’re trained to look for big insights that lead to big campaigns, and we call everything under that “tactics” (sometimes we even treat tactics as a four-letter word when we’re in the midst of a strategic conversation). But in the eyes of a design planner, BakerTweet is proof-of-concept of a platform for innovation. In fact, Kay’s other examples are cases of exactly this. iTunes and the Obama campaign are not, as Kay puts it, “small, relatively invisible things” — they are entire ecosystems of innovation. They are aggregates of many small ideas and innovations that work together toward a common purpose. They essentially become their own micro-economies.
Here’s a great talk by Larry Keeley of Doblin addressing platform-level thinking (He gets to it about 20 minutes into the lecture if you want to fast forward):
[Vimeo=http://vimeo.com/5000092]
So I think we can all look forward to lots more BakerTweets, Secretary-of-StateTweets, FarmerCo-OpTweets, MyPartyStoreIsGettingRobbedTweets etc. . . all Twitter-based appliances designed for very specific purposes when other means of accessing Twitter simply won’t suffice. Perhaps the Twitter API combined with things like Arduino isn’t such a small idea after all.
Is Design Planning the future of Account Planning?
June 29th, 2009 § 1 Comment
On Thursday, I learned that the 2009 Account Planning Conference has been cancelled. It seems we’ll miss this year’s installment of prognostication (and pontification) over the future of planning.
In recent years, the planning conference has seen a fair amount of design thinking infused into both philosophy and process — the “actions speak louder than words” era is upon us. The Jay Chiat Awards call for entries was certainly evidence of this; two categories call for cases involving product design thinking.
It’s also interesting how traditional agencies are beginning to resemble design consultancies. Just have a look at this PSFK panel discussion on agencies thinking outside the traditional agency-client relationship to build brands from the ground up:
I would hope that as a part of this shift, Account Planning will play a major role in bringing the principles of human-centered design to bear on IP. Otherwise, agencies best leave it to the design minds at places like Continuum. Their short film “Resonance” is a great introduction to design planning, offering some hints as to how agencies must change traditional organizational structures if they are to succeed at creating truly relevant IP:
