Leveraging an Application’s Potential
I’m not a Twitter user and I’ve never really found the time to finish a Facebook profile. But it never ceases to amaze me how a large block of influential people can do their best to stonewall and trivialise something simply because they don’t see beyond their current worldview. For example, five years ago when I first started blogging about web standards there were lots of backhanded comments about blogs being for schoolgirls to talk about their weekends. I mean, how wrong were those guys?
It reminds me of the good Senator Ted Stevens and his statement that the Internet is a Series of Tubes.
Similarly, only a year ago I still received angry emails from people insisting that we’d never be using our mobile phones to access the internet. They had some good short term arguments but failed to see the potential leverage that mobiles could provide in achieving things other than making phone calls. Right now if I were a restaurant I’d be thinking in terms of the potential to leverage that mobile phone in every patron’s hand to building and maintaining my ongoing repeat business relationship. If I were a real estate agent I’d be visualising ways to add value to the relationship – what applications are currently out there that can magnify the tool in everybody’s hand who wants to find, rent or buy property. First get their buy-in (don’t push it out at them) and then leverage the ubiquity of mobile technology without fear.
How many times do you look at the television and some politician is denouncing Twitter as a fad? Or telling you that social networking is for schoolgirls to talk about their weekends (like blogs were five years ago)? They fail to see past the tool itself. They fail to realise that some tools can be used in ways totally unimagined by the tool’s creators.
Do people really use Twitter to tell the world they’re going for a crap, how that crap smelled and what they read while they did a crap? Yes they sure do. But Twitter enables large scale ad-hoc organisations to be formed – no interviews, no time-lag, no effort. Its not about the tool as much as it is about the potential to leverage the tool in ways that fit your needs as a user.
You’ll always hear the nay-sayers telling you that the World Wide Web is just another marketing channel, or that they don’t see the point of RSS, or that RFID technology is old hat – hey I’d throw in there that X86 computer architecture is no spring chicken either. And I’d suggest that language is a pretty old ubiquitous technology… and I’d point out that your modern car has about 40 tiny computers. RFID old hat? Its just a tool, a building block – its not the real world application of that tool.
And if you really want to be a smart cookie, you can look at using an existing something like Twitter that already has mass adoption and leveraging the existing potential by creating something newer and even more interesting. Something Twitter doesn’t care to build or didn’t achieve themselves. When you make an iPhone application you’re doing exactly that… where would it be without a platform and the broad world of users?
All I’m saying is not to fall into the trap of boxing things up into safe little parcels. Think horizontally.
