Smartphones have come a long way since they were introduced to the marketplace. Originally they were issued to business employees and employers in order to extend work hours from 9am to 5pm to 24/7. E-mail, calendar, and note-taking functionalities have put the smart in smartphone. With the costs of data plan falling throughout the last decade and with the launch of much iteration of the iPhone and Android platforms, the smartphone has become more accessible and prevalent in American culture. Social media platforms such as Facebook have also added to the smartphone boom by making it obligatory in this day in age to own an online profile, which could be accessed every minute of the day. We will describe and analyze the trends of today’s three (out of many) major forces in the mobile social scene.
Foursquare
Foursquare is a mobile application that was founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai.The idea behind Foursquare is the ability for a person to “check-in” at a location and broadcast it to all of his or her friends. Check-ins can be done via mobile phone, text messaging, or a dedicated Foursquare mobile app on devices on the iOS and Android platforms. Check-ins accumulate “points” for the user and Foursquare quickly becomes a social game among groups of people. This motivation drives people to explore the city where they live and travel.
There are a couple of features that make Foursquare stand out from its competitors. The most prominent feature of Foursquare is the term “mayorship”. The user that most frequents a spot is considered the mayor of the business or location. His or her profile picture appears to everyone checking in at the location, and the business can provide special offers to mayors (ie: a free cup of coffee). The other feature worth noting are deals (excluding mayorship deals). Businesses can easily advertise on their own listing in Foursquare by offering deals for checking in (ie: 1st check-in, every 5 check-ins). Both users and businesses benefit from this by making customers go out to places where they usually don’t go.
Twitter
Twitter entered the mobile social scene in 2006 with its head honcho, Jack Dorsey. In a nutshell, Twitter is a microblogging website that restricts its users’ “tweets” in 140 characters, the length of a standard text message. It revolutionized the way people have communicated to their own networks by providing a quick, instant method of updating everyone else in the group what they were up to at whatever interval they wanted to update at. Twitter receives millions of updates per day, and its user base is continually growing.
There are three main features that made Twitter such an outstanding product. First, the concept of the “retweet”. Retweets are updates similar to “reblogs” from Tumblr. A user can repost the same tweet another poster has tweeted, proliferating the content across different networks of people.Another interesting feature is the ability to mention other users in a tweet by appending the @ symbol in front of the other user’s usernames. Mentioned users will receive a notification that they are being mentioned in another post, which adds another level of interaction among users. The last outstanding feature of Twitter are “hashtags”. Users are able to categorize their tweet by appending a # symbol in front of the category name. This allows tweets to be easily indexed and searchable, and allows Twitter’s analytic programs to find current trends in different locations of the world.
Instagram
The last product I would like to mention is Instagram. Instagram is a relatively new player in the mobile social scene. Currently running exclusively on the iOS platform, Instagram is a social media product that revolves around taking pictures. The big advantage Instagram has over its competitors is its ability to quickly share photos to other social networks. Its user base has quickly grown from 100,000 in October 2010 to 2 million in February 2011. Why has Instagram been able to gain so many new users so quickly? Well it has addressed the base activity of the “social pyramid”. Photo sharing is the most frequent activity done by users in a social platform, such as Facebook. Thus the application has appeased the crowd that loves to share pictures of their lives with one another.
The basic process of taking a photo in Instagram is dead simple. 1) Launch the program 2) Take a photo 3) Apply an effect and 4) Share. The application searches through Facebook and Twitter contact lists to quickly populate users’ friend lists, so sharing photos among friends is a breeze.
All in all, smartphones have not only made us work around the clock 24/7, but have also allowed us to be social 24/7. At every waking minute, we can check up on how our friends are doing, where are friends are going, and what our friends are seeing. Mobile phones have made social life ubiquitous, and I believe that is a good thing. Humans are social animals, and the more we are connected to one another, the more we can do and the more we can share together.
-----
Works referenced:
http://twitter.com
http://foursquare.com
http://instagr.am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foursquare
http://www.quora.com/Instagram
No comments:
Post a Comment