Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

RecreateMyNight is a new service that lets users collectively reconstruct and relive the concert experience using social networks like Facebook and Twitter. It harnesses lifestreaming behavior to generate content around past events.

When fans log on they will see a dashboard where they can click on any concert night to view its recreation or add more media. The website is an advanced social media platform providing users with the ability to view and add content such as video, photos, and status updates. As they travel the country, [a] band will be growing its digital scrapbook by inviting fans to log on and share media.

Yesterday, we saw how text messaging has acted as a "connective tissue for society" during World Cup games. Given the permanence of digital content, we are able to then look back and replay conversation around a given match. Mobile users are actively collecting photos and video during live events in order to remember later.

Today, that content doesn't just sit at home, it is published on sites like Facebook and Flickr. Last fall we observed how concert-goers often waited until the next day to upload and share videos on YouTube. This creates a new morning-after primetime and a behavior that services like RecreateMyNight and SuperGlued bank on.

There is huge potential for brands and artists to participate and enable users in this space. Orange presents a great example with GlastoTag. They provide a 1.3 giga-pixel photo of the crowd at Glastonbury Festival and encourage users to "get tagging," or pinpoint themselves and friends in the masses. From there, Facebook integration helps spread the word via users' social graphs. This lets festival participants relive and remember the experience while also bringing Orange some love.

Textie is a text messaging application for Apple mobile devices. By the makers of Tweetie (recently acquired by Twitter), Textie lets users across iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads message anyone for free, send photos, and receive push notifications.  Just as Skype for iPhone worried carriers, this should too.

For those under 30, it's hard to remember a time when the text message did not exist. The first SMS message was sent in 1993 by a Nokia engineering student, Riku Pihkonen. While telecom companies didn't see it as important, users discovered the power of quick, short messages. It was perfect for modern life and has since exploded; trillions of messages are sent in a year.

While traditional SMS is ubiquitous now, it's functionality is limited -- namely, it's siloed on the phone and it's 1:1. People have developed ways around this -- you can SMS from GChat and group message through TextPlus, for example. Textfree has also solved the expense problem. For some, Twitter replaces SMS because you can access it anywhere. Motoblur introduced a universal inbox to certain Motorola phones, enabling users to check all their messages (SMS, email, tweets...) in one place.

Textie is yet another way to have a better messaging experience. For one, it looks pretty -- clean, simple, well-designed. It combines SMS and email into one unified place. You can communicate with people who don't have the app. Oh, and it's free.

Carriers should be scared. And they should be thinking of ways to improve SMS, and not just overcharge for an archaic service. Otherwise we expect users will gradually move to these free and flexible alternatives.

The Pew Research Center is polling users to answer the question How Millennial Are You? After taking the quiz, users are ranked on a scale placing them within a certain generational group.

A couple mobile related questions that affect "Millennial score" include:

Thinking about your telephone use, do you have...

Only a landline phone in your home

Only a cell phone

Both a landline and cell phone

In the past 24 hours, about how many text messages, if any, did you send or receive on your cell phone?

No text messages on your cell phone in the past 24 hours

1 to 9 text messages

10 to 49 text messages

50 or more text messages

Mobile connected culture is taking off with today's youth. Take the quiz here to find out your place in all of it. Then compare the results with others' here.

Research firm IBS World recently reported that Americans are going to spend $131 million less on cell phone ringtones this year than they did in 2007. This reflects the rise of text messaging as, for several reasons, the synchronous nature of voice calls is no longer as popular.

Today, artist Matthew Inman (AKA "The Oatmeal") presents the 10 reasons to avoid talking on the phone. Many people will relate to "the distracted," "the lecturer," and "the impulsive." Check out all the examples here.

Last September, author Tomi Ahonen gave a talk at PICNIC Amsterdam about the future of mobile. Before discussing ideas available on his blog, Communities Dominate Brands, he jokingly presented a method of determining mental age, using text messaging behavior.

The scale ranges from being a texting-fluent teenager, to being clueless and over 60 years old.

Teenager: Able to carry a conversation with your girlfriend or boyfriend on one phone, and at the same time with your best friend on the other phone.

Twenties: You can easily take  your phone out and send messages with out looking at it.

Thirties: You make use of a QWERTY keyboard. Send a lot of messages.

Forties: Okay with sending and receiving text messages, but your messages are very short. 'Yes' or 'No' responses.

Fifties: Able to read text messages but don't send them. You call back instead.

Sixties: Your phone annoys you. You take it to your child and say, "It's doing it again. Can you make it stop, the stupid envelope blinking?" You do not know how to read a text message.

Where do you place?

The ringtone business is beginning to slide, research firm IBIS World reports that Americans are going to spend $131 million less on cell phone ringtones this year than they did in 2007.

The culprit? Text messaging. Over the past two years the average number of text messages sent has increased by 266%. These devices are being used less and less for voice communication and more for SMS, Twitter, email, social networking, and a slew of other applications. This is exactly why people need to steer away from the training wheel term 'mobile phone', as it assumes devices' primary function is as "an instrument of sound transmission or reproduction."

IntoMobile points to politeness as an explanation for this rise in text messaging. It could also be privacy. When on a date, in the theater, or on the subway you don't always want people to overhear your conversation. SMS on the other hand is both private and transcends time. Responses can be made whenever is most convenient, making real-time conversation not so popular which renders ringtones useless.

India may have developed its own version of Twitter. SMS GupShup is a service that offers groups of cellphone users the opportunity to text message for free with the intent of promoting social networking through text messaging. Users discuss everything from stock tips to religion.

The key to SMS GupShup's strategy is two-fold: one, in a country like India, Internet usage is low and consumers use cellphones more than PCs. And two, that the service can stay free as long as it does not become too popular.

Wall Street Journal reports:

“SMS GupShup's strategy of targeting cellphone users comes with special challenges. Each text message a user sends costs money and SMS GupShup—which means "chitchat" in Hindi—pays on their behalf. While the company buys capacity in bulk from Indian wireless operators, it still costs about 20 cents for each 200 messages.

Given those economics, SMS GupShup is being careful not to let its message traffic grow beyond its ability to generate revenue, which is coming in from advertisers...”

The company limits usage to a maximum of four to eight messages per day, depending on the audience size. This contrasts with U.S. social-networking startups who do not restrict usage because of affordable, web-based services.