Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

The trend is clear: Digital is breaking free. The tethered desktop is old thinking; interactivity is everywhere now. At SXSW Interactive 2010 we saw this trend continue.

With each new service comes change in the way users behave and the relationships they have with each other. One topic on the agenda throughout the entire conference, coupled with the buzz around location, was the current state of privacy.

Microsoft social media researcher Danah Boyd gave a keynote on Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity, which took an in-depth look at today’s social services, the way they are built, their business goals, and the effect they have on society. According to Boyd, privacy is about having control. With services like Facebook, it is important to understand that users are often tricked into sharing personal information with the world. For instance, Facebook said 35% of users had read the new privacy documentation and changed something in the privacy settings, which means 65% of people chose to have their content public. In all of Boyd's research, she has yet to find a single person whose actual privacy settings matched what they thought they were.

One issue is that youth see the web as a pathway to fame, and sometimes over-exposure becomes a problem. Learning what and when to share could become a new sign of maturity. Miley Cyrus quit Twitter even though it meant upsetting the fans. Determining when the right time to check-in on Foursquare is another example of this growing personal responsibility and awareness, many choose not to check-in at home. There is also the danger of things being shared privately getting public exposure. Sexting+Nudie Pics = Digital Violence Among Teens explored the world of digital dating abuse and social pressure through mobile technology.

Where the Internet connects, privacy disconnects. Because the DNA of the web was designed for sharing, it has an enormous impact on the way future generations will think and behave. Behavioral tracking comes with the web; each interaction with it means that much less privacy. With intuitive search on the horizon, users could become used to or adapt to the fact that systems know so much about them.

“How mobile phones have ruined dating and why everyone should want the ability to be completely blown off.”

A little caveat first. I am the co-founder of a technology start-up. Now I know technology has the ability to make our lives better, more efficient, and if entrepreneurs like me do our jobs correctly, eventually more fulfilled. Which is why any of us who are still dating should throw away our mobile phones right now. Mobile phones have ruined dating for good. I know this may be a controversial argument, but hear me out.

For those of us over the age of twenty (my sister is in college so I'm using her as my watermark), we may remember a time not too long ago when everyone had a home phone. Tethered to a long curly cord, you would talk into the receiver with words both gentle and harsh for long hours into the night. If you were talking to your girlfriend or boyfriend you would sometimes just sit on the phone not saying anything while you independently went about your own tasks. This was the golden age of dating - the golden age of being stood up.

Just like the 1950s and handwriting, there once was a time when it was possible to arrange a date with someone to meet at a place and time and for that person to just never show up, never to be heard from again. A blow-off. A waiter asking if he should remove the extra table setting. A bottle of wine for two already poured now a bottle for one. A sad song playing in the background as the camera pans out in the crowded restaurant on the one lonely soul sitting by himself. But was it so sad?

Just think of the information you have because of this stand up! You know categorically that this person is out. You know instantly and without a doubt that you can move on to greener pastures. No time wasted, no second guessing. You may be mad that they decided that sharing an experience with you was less important than whatever they were doing at the same moment, but hey, you had a nice bottle of wine, you ate food (which you would have done regardless), so net net, with all this extra information you now have about this person I'd say you're up on the night. Now fast forward to today.

I'm assuming you have made it past the first step of actually getting someone's phone number. What happens next? In today's world you have to then navigate through an intense and carefully structured set of Byzantine digital dating rules. I’m going to list a few of them:

1. You absolutely cannot call the person. It's almost the equivalent of stalking or heavy breathing on a late night phone call.
2. No Gchat before maybe the third or fourth date, if not longer. Gchats are the death knell of a blossoming romance.
3. You have to send a clever, funny, and bold text message. Maximum 160 characters. Anything longer smacks of desperation. Too bold is too Wall Street.
4. Do not reply to a response quickly. In the age of instant digital gratification, making them wait for responses is good.
5. I’m not even sure what to do about Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or BBM. My gut says don’t touch them – they’re like Gchat.

Those are just a few of the rules and to be honest, I’m constantly seeking the advice of wiser digital dating gurus (aka my sister).

So now you've sent your witty 160-character text message. What ensues is a masterful game of cat and mouse, of push and pull. Clever digital notes passed back and forth across the mobile airwaves with the intention of laying groundwork so you can entice them into seeing you in the physical world. At least I think that's what most people want. This entire stage in the dating process is only made possible by the mobile phone. And because people use their mobile phones for everything nowadays, there are an infinite number of legitimate excuses for why messages were not received or responses delayed. You think maybe their battery did die which means that they still want to see me…

In the event that you do make plans to meet non-virtually, there are always only two options for what happens next. A) They will actually meet you as planned or B) they will not meet you as planned but will inform you and cancel/change the plans prior to the date taking place. What I mean to say is that there will ALWAYS be information about the situation in real time exchanged through mobile devices. Actually showing up to a pre-arranged date and the other person pulling a no-show and not communicating anything just doesn't happen anymore.

You no longer have the gift of categorically verified information about a person's uselessness in one night.  Today if someone changes plans you now have the possibility of having a "text" relationship with someone for weeks and months without ever seeing them. I propose that this is not too dissimilar from prison pen-pals. One day you will be granted parole.

Solution? If ladies just answered their phones when a guy they liked called, then that seems to solve the whole problem. But that’s what, too easy? Maybe we need an iPhone app that prioritizes your contacts based on potential chemistry so low priority matches go straight to voicemail, middle priorities get sent an automatic pre-written text and higher priorities get coveted access to your real live text message. I’m sure I’ve just made a developer a million dollars with this idea.

Or you could just answer your phone.

(Author's note: as I write this a girl that is to be unnamed (Jenna) has blamed her blackberry service for not sending me the email that was supposed to tell me our plans had changed. A digital stand up. But it wasn’t her fault; it was her corporate email account… Maybe she'll read this, feel guilty and actually call me.)

Jesse Solomon is the Co-founder of RightsCube – the online source for all of the world's film and television rights information.  RightsCube enables media buyers more purchasing power and enable content owners access to a larger pool of potential buyers than their traditional sales channels would allow. He can be contacted at jesse [at] rightscube.com

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, you might want to keep your sexting between just you and your significant other. According to a study released by mobile social network Mocospace, one out of three of their users admitted to flirting with someone else via their phone, while on a date.

Mocospace surveyed around 20,000 of their 10.3 million members about their texting habits. In addition to the flirt-texting, the survey revealed that 57% have used a mobile phone to end a relationship, 48% with a text message. While the numbers seem high, MocoSpace claims that most of its users are under the age of 30, making the report believable.

[via techcrunch]

Unless you live under a rock, you've heard about Tiger Woods and his risqué text messaging. It's an instance of "sexting," which is equally impossible to avoid. According to a new study by MTV and the AP, 1/3 of adolescents admit to the practice. Unlike analog promiscuity, texting has major privacy implications. Once content becomes digital, it can often find its way to being public and almost impossible to destroy. In Tiger Woods' case: an explosion in mass media coverage and damaged reputations.

It seems that even with this risk, users would rather take a chance over dropping the technology altogether. Or we simply fail to use long-term thinking. With this in mind, perhaps there is a compromise to be found in this privacy/technology conflict, something that Japan's advanced mobile society has already tried to tackle. The popularity of clamshell devices in Japan has been attributed to the privacy they afford.  Privacy screens that shield a phone's display from wandering eyes are also common. Another solution is a "secret history." The Financial Times reports:

A recent survey by Macromill, an online researcher, showed that 61 per cent of respondents – in this case Japanese mothers with young children – secretly check the contents of their husband’s mobile phone. Of that figure, 35 per cent are checking to see if their husbands are having an affair, while 28 per cent are checking to see if their other half is hiding something from them.

For those husbands (or wives) who do have something, or someone, to hide, some handsets offer a function that can prevent certain phone numbers or e-mails being recorded in the incoming and outgoing call/mail history.

As mobile technology becomes increasingly ingrained in our society, new behaviors will arise. With them will come problems, which further innovations will look to solve. For instance, Firefox private browsing was developed when users' searching histories came back to bite them. We in no way condone Tiger Woods' all-out sexting, but it is obvious that, for his brand, a secret history would've trumped accidental transparency.

LG has a new series of commercials featuring James Lipton, the host of Inside the Actor's Studio. Positioned as public service announcements, these ads urge teens to "give it a ponder" before sexting or spreading Gossip Girl-style texts.
This particular ad features a teen boy, Stephan, who is having a "steamy back and forth text with his girlfriend Zoë" and is about to send her a "pic of his junk."

While the ad is worth watching just to hear Lipton say these words, do they ring true?

The warning seems to be justified. According to a survey fielded by TRU:

• 18% of teen boys and 22% of teen girls say they have sent/posted nude or seminude pictures or video of themselves
• 71% of teen girls and 67% of teen guys who have sent or posted sexually suggestive content say they have sent/posted this content to a boyfriend/girlfriend.
• 36% of teen girls and 39% of teen boys say it is common for nude or semi-nude photos to get shared with people other than the intended recipient.
• 38% of teen girls and 39% of teen boys say they have had sexually suggestive text messages or emails— originally meant for someone else—shared with them.

So what did teens think? Rebecca Cullers at AdFreak did a (very) informal opinion poll:

My husband happens to have a whole class of 9th graders who saw the ads during homeroom. What did they say? "Why does she have a beard? I don't get it. That's retarded."

Perhaps Lipton's beard-scratching pontification isn't as well-known amongst the under-30 set, but now they will likely know him as "the old guy who says 'tweets about his piece' in that weird commercial."

Truth in Advertising is a running series of television commercials that portray consumers using mobile technology in their everyday life. They take a look at how brands are demonstrating our want and need for mobility. Click here to view previous entries.

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?

Cabbies Stay on Their Phones Despite Ban [NYTimes]
Debates about banning texting for all drivers point to the inefficiency of the NYC ban for cabbies, which has been in effect for over 10 years now, but seldom obeyed or enforced.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on Mobile, Broadband, iPhone & Innovation [GigaOM]
The FCC's new creed is competition, consumers, innovation, and investment. The chairman states that he is heavily invested in developing a broader, consumer driven mobile offering.

Goldman Sachs: BlackBerry, iPhone own smartphones [ZDNet]
Findings from a Goldman Sachs report on smartphones in the workplace: Employees want iPhones but are getting Blackberrys; fidelity is high when it comes to the device less so to the carrier; and 55% use the their smartphone for personal as well as business matters.

RingtoneStudio for iPhone: $10 of Purchase Price Goes to One Laptop Per Child Program [MobileContentToday]
RingtonStudio, a $29.95 iPhone app, is partnering with the OLPC program and giving $10 of each app sale to the charity. So much for micropayments...

Sexting 'Absolutely Mortified Me' [BBC Newsbeat]
New public awareness campaigns are trying to curb the "sexting" trend by making kids aware of the consequences.

How True is the Promise of a “Flat world” ? [Priyanka’s Blog]
Data shows that college students are using social networks to primarily communicate with groups of real-life friends, which are defined by education, race, income, and gender. Some may claim this damages the idea that SNS unite people form all walks of life, but perhaps it just depends on the content and dynamics of a particular social network.

A Third of Young People Would Not Pay for Music Online [The Guardian]
Research for the E.U. has found that 33% of 16-24 year olds are unwilling to pay for music and videos no matter what type of payment scheme is offered.

Ad-supported content, Out: Paid Content, In? [Fast Company]
In 2008, for the first time, people used more paid content than ad-supported stuff, according to a new survey. However, people are being a bit particular about which content they pay for--the changeover between ad-supported and paid content came from people reading books (including ebooks) and watching cable TV rather than reading newspapers or magazines.

Advertising and the Future of Wireless [Network World]
To offset this cost and raise the appeal of LBS, carriers are looking to integrate ads into their business solutions.

Can Texting Bring Teens, Parents Closer 2gether? [Salt Lake Tribune]
Many kids are teaching their parents to text, letting them communicate on their terms. From “where are you?” to “make your bed”, many are finding texting is the best way to be heard.

Mobile Junkies Hard to Reach with Other Media [MarketingVOX]
Mobile Video viewers are avid mobile users, new data shows. 78% rely on their mobile for up-to-the-minute info, 71% prefer to receive info via mobile internet, and 50% spend more time away from computers than in front of them.

Mobile Virtual World [Cellufun]
Cellufun, the community known as "The World's Mobile Playground," announced that they’ve past 2 million registered mobile users. The company cites new mobile operator partners, avatars, virtual goods, innovative games, and friend features for their substantial increase in registration traffic over the last quarter.