Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

Language is a living thing, constantly evolving to reflect the world we live in. Today, the hyperfast pace of technological innovation is a major force driving linguistic change -- and not just acronymatic txtspk. Real words to capture the zeitgeist and express new concepts and constructs.

Many of these neologisms come from teens and the tech community. While these groups have always had their own slang, it's increasingly filtering up into common parlance, even (offline) dictionaries. Witness "unfriend", named 2009 Word for the Year by the linguistic gatekeepers at The New Oxford American Dictionary.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.

"It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. While sites like Urban Dictionary and Word Spy chronicle new words as they are coined, traditional dictionaries are understandably a bit more discriminating, so its interesting to see what makes their cut. This is certainly an indicator of the influence that young people and the web have on everyone's daily lives and our culture as a whole.

Here are some other youth and tech-inspired neologisms that Oxford was considering:

• hashtag – a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets

• intexticated – distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle

• netbook – a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory

• paywall – a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

• sexting – the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone

What else do you think they should have considered?

Cheaper manufacturing is allowing designers to create a multitude of gadgets to fit our every need. On top of PCs, MP3 players, laptops and mobile phones, the netbook category is growing fast, and  rumors of an Apple tablet have been circulating for months now. While having all these gadgets is great, data needs to be managed in a seamless fashion across this increasingly fragmented inventory of screens. Sure, Flickr and YouTube do the 'cloud' with crowd-sourced media, but where are our options for syncing more personal, secure, and private files? We just won't settle for USB drives or floppy discs anymore.

Perhaps a pioneer in this area, Apple has been offering data synchronization with MobileMe since 2002. The service pushes contacts, calendars, and mail to iPhone, Mac, and PC. Also included is iDisk, which with the new iPhone application allows storing, sharing, and accessing of files across devices.

Many other companies are attempting to create a solution for managing personal data. Microsoft brings these features with the new Windows 7 and mobile specific 'My Phone' service. Naturally, Google is in the cloud with Docs, Chrome bookmark syncing, and Sync for Mobile. Smaller, but successful, startups in the space include Dropbox and Drop.io (both have apps that make files iPhone accessible). And now there is Best Buy's new mIQ, which seeks to brand this mobile trend. All make the transition from performing functions on one device to another smoother, as the data is available in either location. One hurdle to mass adoption seems to be the platform bias of some services, for example, Microsoft's 'My Phone' plays well only with phones running Windows Mobile 6.

It seems that many are trying to become the one service to rule all data, but could it be that it is too big a task? Truth is, our individual digital rituals and behaviors vary too much for one software solution to address them all. Focused development will be key. This is happening in the cloud-based music space, for example.  Being niche allows start-ups like Spotify, Lala, and Rhapsody to notice the most specific of our music listening habits and needs, then to design for them. With a fragmented market of gadgets, do we need a mass-market "vanilla" cloud for synchronized data, or a wide offering of apps for our variety of needs?

In any case, the proliferation of these cloud-based solutions points to an overarching need—the need to be seamless. Right now, it’s a frustration for users, but it will soon be an expectation.

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