Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Couple of thoughts on mobile triggers

Thinking mobile presence, facebook and the home screen
In the past I've made quite a few posts about mobile address-book integrated presence application. An application that would show the presence status of your contacts, from your address book or from any of your online communities. Specifically, that presence application would show the change in the contact's status, which hopefully, would trigger an action: if someone comes online you may want to call or IM them. If someone goes offline you won't call them but send an email etc. Obviously this presence application would have a couple more gems like location awareness, so you know you and your friend are now in the same city and can grab a beer tonight, it could have mood etc.

But the more I think about it, I'm pretty much describing the facebook mini feed! It's not so much about the current presence of your friends as much as the change in their status that is interesting. Like facebook, you may want to explore the same applications or groups they do, post messages, videos etc., make a call, send an email etc.

The other thought that came to mind is that ideally this application would run as a background application and would populate the idle, and home screen of one's mobile phone. Combined with advertising. Obviously phones need to have multi task support but Symbian, windows mobile and Blackberry already have that last time I checked.

What else: twitter updates, blog feeds, location and travel (like Dopplr), it's all there. content (music, videos) sharing and recommendations. Yelp, traffic.com etc. the sky is the limit.

Imagine the phone enabling the wealth of all facebook applications in the idle screen. Let the community work for you. If you know the approach uLocate took in their location-aware application suite 'Where', which is location specific, it is similar.

If I had the energy, that's the startup I would build.

3 comments:

Antony said...

Amir,

What your talking about is a form of On Device Portal (ODP) this and all the features you've just mentioned already exist and have been commercialised by a number of different startups.

One carrier here in Australia (Optus) has already implemented this on some of the Nokia Symbian devices and allows you to, at a glance check on your home screen the status of your contacts whether they are online/offline and their most preferred method of contact SMS/Call/IM/Email, apparently the next iteration will also be location aware.

It's called
MyStaus
and is a feature of the Optus MyZooNow On Device Portal deployed by uiActive

Unknown said...

Very cool Antony, means I'm in the right directions, maybe timing a bit off :-)
Are you with uiActive? Shoot me a linkedIn.
Amir

Unknown said...

BTW Antony, closer look at uiActive, the web site doesn't talk much about their social strategy, no mention of address book integration etc.
While ODP concept is interesting, I think the personal friends-based interaction is key to drive increased traffic. News and blogs, with all due respect, are somewhat static in that respect.
thanks-
A