In a recent New York Times piece, David Colman takes a look at the fine art of self-presentation. Once the realm of models, the proliferation of camera phones makes it a useful skill for the everyday person. Photography itself is changing.
“This really represents the shift of the photograph serving as a memorial function to a communication device,” said Geoffrey Batchen.
“The camera was used to record something that happened so it could be remembered. Now it’s used immediately. It’s uploaded to Facebook to say, ‘Here I am in Istanbul’ or whatever, so it also goes back and forth between personal and promotional use. It really represents the refashioning of the self for a semipublic view.”
The popularity of apps like CameraBag and Hipstamatic only go to validate the argument. So does the excitement over iPhone 4's front-facing camera. People care deeply about how they look to others and these tools give us control.
Streams of tweets, Facebook updates, blog posts, and Flickr images show us that people like to share what they're eating, and services like Foodspotting and Eat.ly build on this existing behavior. They are now joined by Fiddme, a "local visual guide to culinary wonders around you" lets you "lifestream" your lunch, share it with your social graph, and discover new dishes and restaurants from fellow foodies.
The service, which comes in the form of both a Web and an iPhone application, lets people share their favorite dishes in restaurants or other places by taking a picture of said food and adding a short caption, where it is being consumed and even recipes.
Fiddme lets users connect and share via already existing social networks; these include Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. It also has a location-based approach, letting you check-in to a restaurant Foursquare-style and show what you are eating. In fact, the site actually looks a heck of a lot like Foursquare, and arguably this is a feature that it notably lacks i.e. the ability to attach photos when you check in. With Fiddme, these photos become the organizing principle of the social network.
For restaurant owners, this digital behavior could be worth encouraging. It would act like "pumping a scent out of a bakery window to draw people in." People also like to see what they are getting before they order. Let's just hope cameraphone photos do their dishes justice.
Nokia has unveiled its 2010 flagship device, the N8. It is packed with all sorts of gadget goodness, but one feature that stands out is its 12-megapixel camera with Xenon flash and HD video recording capabilities. The technical specifications aside, what is the consequence of this development, how do we see it being repurposed, and will it affect the way we live?
Users are going to be all for this next step in the evolution of camera phones. Along with SMS, the camera is a mobile phone feature that has become ubiquitous and expected. An analyst at Strategies Unlimited estimated that of 4.6 billion mobile phones in use, more than a billion are equipped with cameras. This is why mobile campaigns by McDonald's and Jimmy Choo are able to pass-up barcodes entirely and instead let users engage via MMS. And of course, the best camera is the one that's with you.
Aside from simple everyday use cases such as memory capture and family photos, the camera phone is what fuels phenomena such as citizen journalism and citizen science. At a mass scale, they are used for participatory sensing, or the gathering of environmental data. This and 3G connectivity is what gives mobile users the power to tell their own stories, and present the world in a bottom-up manner.
Whether lifestreaming a concert or reporting on an event, camera phones have played a huge part in molding today's participatory culture. We've seen people foodspotting before a meal, stalking celebrities, and making outfit decisions all with a camera phone. In many countries, traditional media has been forced to embrace citizen reporting. Even with iReport, CNN is often spotted featuring Twitpic and Ustream. But for the most part, the visual quality of this content has been sub-par. With the Nokia N8, let's take a moment to imagine. Imagine a world seen from a billion different perspectives, and as cheesy as it may read, a world captured in HD.
As a "side project," I do a web show with Meghan Keane (of eConsultancy) called Good Morning Interwebs. For what we are calling "Wake Up with a Startup,” we've begun visiting New York-based startups to have some coffee and chat about what's going on at their HQ.
Our most recent episode (below) was with Justin Shaffer at Hot Potato, a new real-time startup getting a lot of buzz in tech circles. The service is designed to connect people around real events as they are happening, be it a ball game, a TV show, a conference, etc. It taps into two key trends: social viewing and lifestreaming.
Hot Potato has an iPhone app as well as a website, which let users:
• "Check in" and record presence, broadcasting it to friends
• Post photos and notes
In a way, it’s a lot like a Google Wave or even an old-school chat room, letting people contribute content to a real-time stream based on a certain topic. Check out the Hot Potato event we created for Good Morning Interwebs to see it in action.
Smart Filtering
According to Shaffer, they are mainly focused on building a smart technology that uses your social graph, context, location data to filter your stream. To “filter” content, Hot Potato uses a simple curation system based on comments and likes. The goal is to make you feel like you are part of a larger audience and give you as much perspective as possible. The next full version of the app will also focus more on segmentation between your friends and random "interesting" people.
Hot Potato vs Twitter Hashtags
Some have asked what makes this any different than simple hashtagging an event on Twitter. It scales better, for one. Events can be hard to find on Twitter, and even when you know the hashtag to follow, conversation can become noisy and crowded. Shaffer sees the long term potential of the service to be the inherent discoverability of events on Hot Potato thanks to its network effects. This is why they are eschewing white-labeling, focusing rather on building tools that help content producers create and promote their events. To this end, their iPhone app is going to be simplified, optimizing the experience for simple, easy content creation while mobile. It will have audio and video in addition to photos, presenting a more rich multimedia experience for users. They are also working on drop.io integration, which would create tools for content producers to add more media and interaction. The hope here is become a single point of entry for event content.
Mobilizing Events
The People's Choice Awards last week was a strong testament to the power of mobile at events. Jessica Alba tweeted while she was presenting, Ashton live streamed his acceptance speech from his own phone over Ustream, and Queen Latifah snapped and uploaded photos as she hosted the event. Meanwhile, Twitter saw a spike in traffic during the event for #peopleschoice, #peopleschoiceawards, #peopleschoiceaward, which reflects the social viewing taking place during the show. But it also makes point above about why hashtags are not ideal. In order to have a real conversation, everyone needs to be on the same page.
The Ifs
Justin and Hot Potato are placing their bets on the mainstreaming of lifestreaming and its consumption, inferring that people will want this content around events all aggregated for them. Hot Potato is essentially an information filter, parsing streams of data by context and social connections.
The yet unknowns are: Will we soon be gathering more of our content from multiple sources rather than one single broadcaster? If so, will this wrest control of media from its original producers, creating new ways to monetize audience around it? And if so again, will this add incremental value or cannibalize existing dollars? Those are a lot of 'if's there, but we are indeed already seeing this consumer behavior develop (see The Concert Chronicles: Uploading a New Morning-After Primetime).
Watch the full episode of Good Morning Interwebs below or here:
See past episodes of Good Morning Interwebs and learn about future ones at theinterwebs.tv.
Read Meghan Keane's full interview with Justin Shaffer on eConsultancy's blog.
Social networking is all the rage. Unless you haven’t walked outside, turned on your TV or been visited by anyone in the past year, I’m not telling you something you don’t already know. Social networking and the act of broadcasting your life – or lifestreaming – to the larger online arena is nothing new, but it is gaining massive momentum and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.
However, as we continue to come up with more “instant” vehicles of communication, the question I want answered is why? Why do people want to be connected all the time? Why do I want to tell 457 followers that I ate a turkey and mayo sandwich for lunch? There are countless studies dedicated to how social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are changing the evolutionary communication game and affecting everyone from my little sister to my elderly grandmother but few that have satiated my craving for the real reasons people share so much.
I understand the instant gratification of showing everyone how “cool” your life is – vacations to exotic places, your new baby, even how miserable “insert city/school/significant other” is. I get it. But it takes serious dedication to update your status on the regular, comment on your second cousin’s twice removed ex-wife’s videos and post photos of every activity you’ve been participating in – I mean, how else would everyone know that you were really there? Never mind that you probably had a great time documenting the experience instead of say, experiencing it? Why the sudden narcissism and obsession with everyone knowing how great we are?
Working in an industry that requires me to be on top of my social networking game, I learned of Twitter earlier than most of my friends and so I was often asked, “What’s this Twitter thing all about?” I’m sure I confused (and even angered some) people when I remarked that Twitter was essentially marketers talking to marketers. To some extent, I still believe that. At the advent of Twitter, PR professionals, advertising execs and marketers rushed in to flex their intelligence muscles, proving that they really “understood” the space by posting industry relevant links every hour, on the hour. It’s comical to think back because at that time, the creators of Twitter didn’t even understand the space they were creating, so how did anyone else?
The face of Twitter has radically changed and influenced society in ways that were never conceived at the start (Twitter Search: Iranian election conflicts), arguably for the betterment of the global community at large. I’m not at all suggesting that this isn’t a monumental breakthrough in the way that we source and consume information at a very high level – it certainly is – and I don’t think that’s the point of this article. I 100% agree that we should be using these avenues as a way to disseminate information that needs to be given a voice but my question is how do we differentiate between global crises and my friend’s drinking marathon last weekend? And why do we feel the need to share something so seemingly insignificant when so many actual issues are in play?
Clinical psychologist Oliver James recently wrote an article called, “I Tweet, Therefore I Am.” In his piece he states that “Twittering stems from a lack of identity.” Though I think this is a harsh statement, and one that I’m sure those engulfed in the Iranian conflict would strongly disagree with, it does help shed light on why some people feel enamored to share everything. We’ve already learned that the computer is a great barrier wall in which people feel comfortable saying and doing things that they would never actually say or do in real life.
For this same reason, I have a theory that people post photos and update their statuses to reflect a type of self-made image of their perfect selves – in other words, who they wish they could be in real-life. Whereas I may not tell everyone I come across that I went to a music festival, if they see if my Facebook photos or Twitter updates, I am now the type of person that "goes to music festivals.” Social networks allow us to become exactly who we wish we could be all the time with no slip-ups or explanations. This is why documenting the experience becomes just as much – if not more –important than actually being in the moment and experiencing whatever it is you may be experiencing and also why status updates are often times marked by wit, provocative thought, etc. In a global and mobile “always on” atmosphere where everyone is clamoring to define themselves from everyone else, social networks play an important role in creating an everlasting, if not sometimes misleading, identity.
Think about this for a minute and answer honestly: Why do you participate in social networks?
FanFeedr Aims to Hit a Home Run With Comments | GigaOm - FanFeedr aims to be a one-stop online destination for sports fans by aggregating news, photos, videos, tweets and scores for a variety of sports teams they choose to follow. The company just released a feature that lets people comment on status updates and user activity posted on its home page, which is intended to encourage virtual cheering and friendly banter among users about the latest happenings in the sports world.
The Mobile App User Experience | Functioning Form (via EverydayUX) - The 1.5 billion downloads thus far from Apple’s App Store clearly demonstrate a user experience in high demand. But why are native mobile applications such a desirable user experience? LukeW outlines 3 factors.
Zune HD's "Apps" menu item spotted in the Marketplace, still short on details | engadget - Footage from Best Buy's Zune HD preview of the "Apps" item that resides within the "Marketplace" section on the device. It's unclear what Microsoft's plans are for that functionality, but there's obviously a lot of implied competition with Apple's App Store that the word "Apps" on a touchscreen device conjures up.
Nokia to use Windows in forthcoming Booklet 3G | FierceWireless - Nokia is skipping touchscreen phones and going straight after Apple's new Tablet. Just days after confirming plans to enter the netbook market, Nokia released additional details of the effort including the name of its forthcoming gadget: Booklet 3G.
Mobile Gaming Wrap: EA, SocialDeck Stock Up The BlackBerry App World | mocoNews - Mobile social gaming firm SocialDeck just released Shake & Spell for the BlackBerry, creating its first game that shares info across Facebook, the iPhone and the RIM device. The game initially launched on the iPhone and Facebook last year; it amassed over 500,000 users. Now users can play with and compete against each other across all three platforms.
Johnson & Johnson's BabyCenter gives birth to new breed of app | Mobile Marketer - 55% of moms today let their children play with their mobile phone regardless of handset model or price, according to “BabyCenter’s 21st Century Mom Report.” With this in mind, BabyCenter came out with the PhonyPhone application, which provides for an educational experience for the child and a mother’s uninhibited ability to let children play on.
A Manifesto for Slow Communication | WSJ.com - A well-reasoned argument for slowing down the breakneck pace of the Information Age: "This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, workplace meltdowns, and unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen?"
We observe emerging mobile technology, cultural trends, and consumer behavior, then connect the dots to generate mobile strategy and intelligence for leading global brands. This is what we're seeing and thinking.
