Archive for December, 2007
by Ewan Spence
December 31, 2007 at 10:45 am · Filed under MMS, Carriers, Instant Messaging, Communication
And so it begins.
My phone is already beeping at me with text’s from all my friends wishing me a Happy New Year – of course being Scottish Hogmanay (December the 31st) is effectively the start of a three day national holiday which is know for drinking vile drinks, eating vile animals, and generally enjoying life as much as possible.
But it also coincides with one of the busiest times for the UK mobile networks in terms of traffic not of voice calls, but in texts. The New Year message, as midnight strikes, invariably sees a significant number of subscribers on every network send an SMS wishing them all the best for 2008. And it’s not just to one person, it’s to a significant proportion, if not all, of their address book.
Now take the average address book, multiply that out by the number of people looking to send such a batch of messages, and there’s no doubt that come Jan 2nd, I’m sure the PR departments will warm-up the “written on Dec 14th minus the number†press release with “the biggest year for texts yet in the United Kingdom.†And I’m also sure we’ll hear the stories of texts taking hours to get through, network saturation at the centre of street parties, a log-jam of data and calls in networks that struggle to cope.
Make no bones, this is one of the biggest nights of the year for mobile messaging, certainly in the UK. Yes there has been localised pressure over the last months and years (case in point being the London Underground bombings) but this is both predictable, and nationwide (and I’m sure a wodge of international traffic in and out as well).
So do you design your network for the peak of the busiest night, or do you aim somewhere below that because the spare capacity isn’t needed for the other 354 days? My guess is probably the later, but knowing that the networks are constantly expanding, I suspect the capacity that is filled tonight would have easily coped with the traffic from last year, and capacity 12 months down the line would cope with tonight. This increase in bandwidth, capacity and handling goes on behind the scenes without the subscriber even realising, and for all that we complain about the big bad networks, take a moment to think just how many texts will get shuffled around tonight, even if there is a ten-fifteen minute delay on some of them.
Happy New Year!!!
Update: While coverage was spotty in Edinburgh, there were no real delays on voice - only took three rings to get through mobile to mobile at about ten past midnight. Txts seemed to flow freely, as they also did for Ewan McLeod. How did your messages get through?
by Ewan Spence
December 28, 2007 at 5:45 pm · Filed under Communication, Convergence, Advertising
There are some who hope that the mobile message in 2008 will simply read “Vote Bush for President 2008.†(Un)fortunately term limits take care of that one, but there are a lot of names who want to be there come November 2008, and getting their message out is their goal.
Now, being based in the UK, and in a constituency that is pretty much solid for one party, I’m not going to preach here about the benefits or problems with one US Presidential Candidate over another; what I am interested in is how they’re going to use Web 2.0 and Mobile Messaging to find, mobilise and use their supporters.
Ewan MacLeod pointed this out over the festive seasons with a post on Obama’s use of SMS shortcodes (in his case OBAMA, or 62262). It didn’t take long for the supporter of another candidate to point out their shortcode – Hilary Clinton using 442008 (the 44th President will be elected in 2008). It’s not the first time MacLeod has pointed out Obama’s use of technology, with his use of text messaging to gain an audience for his show with TV host Oprah Winfrey, but I’m sure we’ll see more and more of this in the next few weeks and months (during Primary season) and then onwards with the chosen candidates towards the main event.
It says a lot about the power of Web 2.0 to reach the younger votes, a group that is generally regarded as being hard to both reach and motivate – interacting with them on platforms such as Facebook, having Twitter accounts is going to become the norm for candidates in many elections, not just the bigger US versions. It might take time, but the blogging politician has an opportunity to make a connection for life with his or her constituents; something especially important where there are no term limits (such as Capitol Hill in the US and the United Kingdom House of Commons).
What’s been the most unusual political outreach online you’ve seen?
by Imran Ali
December 27, 2007 at 4:28 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Devices, Studies + Research, On Blogs and Blogging, Ethnography, Communication, Convergence, Email
In the last couple of weeks, the various contributors to Mobile Messaging 2.0 have been holding an open debate on what the definition of a mobile message should be; with some insightful and thought provoking contributions from Debi, Darla, Ewan, Paul and Russell…almost the entire team!
From my own perspective as a user, cognitively, I don’t think I’ve ever made distinctions between mobile messaging or ‘fixed’ messaging. In fact the means of transmission is pretty much meaningless to me, with a focus on where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m talking about and with whom I’m communicating.
Every day I expect 100-150 incoming emails, around a 1000 blogposts at Bloglines, maybe 50-75 Twitters, an average of 5 voice calls, 5-10 Facebook messages and the odd notification from a blog comment, Facebook event, YouTube, Upcoming, Last.fm or eBay. Every now and again, I might even receive an MMS!
They’re all just messages - some land in my mailbox, others in various web application inboxes, some on my mobile phone. I might see a Facebook notification email arrive in my N95’s inbox and reply using the mobile web UI for Facebook. I may receive a direct Twitter on my phone as an SMS and reply using Twitterific on my Mac. Sometimes I wander around the house firing off replies from an iPod touch.
Conversations and communications start in one application, end in another and meander through various fixed and mobile networks…it’s all communication, driven by context and situation.
Perhaps there’s a meta-question we need to address collectively. Rather than exploring definition of mobile messaging, we perhaps need to understand why this definition is important. Are we more interested in the mobile portions of a conversation’s journey or in the multi-modal nature of that conversation?
I would argue that the latter question is perhaps more significant, simply because this is an area in which the industry lacks knowledge. Classifying messages by network or device is relatively easy to comprehend, but doesn’t reflect the reality of usage most of us now experience.
We can perhaps learn much more about the design and usage of communication by delving deep into the motivations we have when switching contexts between services, devices, location, time and relationship…
by Imran Ali
December 26, 2007 at 2:04 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Devices, Studies + Research, Usage + Usability, Events + Conferences, iPhone, Twitter, Video Conferencing, Openmoko, Communication, Voice, Research
With the sad cancellation of O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony conferences, it seemed that the unique melting pot of traditional telcos, cellcos and bleeding-edge disruptive innovators, hackers and entrepreneurs would dissipate.
Thanks to the efforts of one of the former ETel advisory board members, Lee Dryburgh, the unique conversation between these communities will move beyond telephony into ‘communication’ in all its forms - social media, telephony, ethnographics and - of course - mobility.
Lee is hosting the inaugural Emerging Communications 2008, conference next Spring in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum. The conference wil also be accompanied by an unconference day, providing a mix of traditional conferences with the energy of a parallel BarCamp-style event.
Though the lineup isn’t finalised yet, there are some interesting speakers lined up already, including sessions on Building Twitter from Blaine Cook, Emerging & Usage Patterns from Intel’s Dawn Nafus, OpenMoko’s Michael Shiloh and thought leaders such as Norman Lewis and Sheldon Renan.
One of the underlying implicit themes from the current programme of speakers seems to be the potential in the intersection of telephony and social networks - issues which speak to the future of mobile messaging, a topic covered by MM2.0 contributors just recently.
Though not focussed exclusively on the mobile industry, eComm 2008 promises to surface some interesting directions for messaging and communication. As such it’s a community that we need to watch closely, listening for the weak signals that’ll give clues as to what happens next in the industry…
{ Disclosure: I’m a member of the voluntary eComm 2008 advisory board. }
by Imran Ali
December 26, 2007 at 12:53 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Voicemail, Facebook, Communication, Email, Gmail
Recently, here at Mobile Messaging 2.0, there’s been much discussion as to the definition of a ‘mobile message’.
There’s been some great commentary and debate with a focus on context, usage, the means of transmission, however there’s a parallel question which I believe to be of some importance - our messages exist in various places, how can we ensure that those messages have mobility?
More specifically, as messaging usage fragments across many services and devices, how do we make sure that those messages - the emotional and professional fragments of our lives - can move with us when we switch services or devices.
Voice messages, text messages, email, photomessages, Twitters, RSS posts and Facebook messages aren’t simply dry digital constructs, but the ‘emotional bits‘ that comprise a large part of our individual and collective memories, yet our tools for archiving and mobilising them are crudely shortsighted.
- The last voice message from a recently deceased relative is a precious memory, yet voicemail is treated ephemerally often disappearing after just a few days, with no way to archive.
- People often keep precious text messages from loved for long periods of time on their handsets, yet when they switch phones, there are no consistent mechanisms to port messages from one phone to another.
- I’ve been a Hotmail user since 1999 - after 8 years I’d love to switch to Gmail, but Microsoft offer me no mechanism to export eight years of deeply personal content to another service. Damn, I’d even pay them for such a feature.
Google’s recent adoption of IMAP for Gmail is one of the first clear moves by a major messaging provider to support such needs. In a recent interview, Gmail Product Manager, Keith Coleman, stated that:
Millions of people start using Gmail each month, and many of them tell us how hard it can be to switch email accounts, particularly when switching from a service that doesn’t offer POP, IMAP or forwarding. We didn’t want Gmail users to have to go through that if they ever wanted to move away.
Thought Google’s intentions are noble, IMAP doesn’t go far enough in providing the level of openness that is neccessary; Google’s own support documents illustrate that Gmail’s innovative message labelling doesn’t map directly onto the antiquated IMAP folder structure…also, it’s only good for email!
What’s needed is an open data format supported by all messaging applications such that mailboxes can be imported, exported or synced - preserving the message metadata and content, whether text, video or audio.
For service providers concerned about user retention, adding such capabilities may even add further value. I don’t mind keeping my voicemail with O2, as long as I can archive it to Gmail, or leaving photomessages on my mobile handset as long as my Flickr account can pull them into a longer term archive.
Perhaps a combination of embedded microformats, IMAP and mbox could provide the technological framework of a new Open Message Box standard for mobilising our messages.
by Imran Ali
December 23, 2007 at 9:04 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Ethnography, Research
A couple of weeks ago I was introduced to Nathan Eagle’s research on Reality Mining at MIT by eComm’s Lee Dryburgh (Nathan will be speaking at eComm 2008 in March).
Though Eagle’s work is a couple years old, it represents one of the more comprehensive studies of mobile communication and ethnography.
Supported by Nokia, the Reality Mining project has collated and mined data from the mobile handsets of 100 users and modeled various social behaviours, including conversation context, activity, proximity, location, time and relationship networks - both for individuals and aggregate groups of people.
The project’s themes have included…
- Modelling complex social systems - with applications as diverse as disease control and the social lives of freshman MIT students!
- Behaviour modelling and prediction - including generation of an automatic ‘lifelog’ of events cross referenced with the various ‘encounters’ between participants in the research. Intriguingly,researchers have attempted to model the probability of where and when people will be against their actual behaviour to determine the accuracy of predictions.
- Relationship inference - trying to automate and understand the relationship between participants based on their pattern of communication, movements and encounters.
- Social Serendipity - in the light of Dopplr’s success, the research’s investigation of serendipity seems prescient, with suggested application areas including dating, conferences and (surprisingly)Â the enterprise arena.
With the study’s raw data and client applications freely available to the world, I would expect to see handsets and services which begin to exploit the learning from this work. By embedding intelligence about my relationships and inferring behavior, could mobile communication and messaging evolve to a mixed model of explicit and overt messages with underlying exchanges of social signals, locations, moods, behavior and preference?
(Coincidentally, RW/W and MIT’s own Technology Review covered this story last week…I wonder if that’s where Lee first came across it?)
by Ewan Spence
December 17, 2007 at 9:36 am · Filed under Software, Usage + Usability, mobile social networking, GPS, WIMM
While we’ve all focused on messages that get to you while you are mobile, I thought I’d point out another sort of mobile message – the message that comes from a mobile, to a recipient. And with the flexibility of a computer in your pocket, Nokia’s Sports Tracker (currently in beta) is yet another signpost to the future and what Web 2.0 and mobile can do for messaging.
The application on the handset is very simple. It takes a record of your location using either a bluetooth GPS or (on phones such as Nokia’s N95) the built in GPS. From this lots of info can be derived… your speed, average pace, height and a bundle of other stats from your trips you make. The N95’s built in accelerometers even help with a pedometer coming into the mix. Just hit start and stop at the relevant times. This of course is great for people who perhaps are doing jogging for fitness, or taking long cycle rides (like myself) but it also has a bundle of other uses; two examples…
Vegas the Dog. He’s mentioned a lot in Nokia keynotes on this – his owner strapped an N95 to his dog collar and started to record the walks that Vegas made. Not just where he went as an owner, but where Vegas went when he was tearing round parks, in trees, and after chickens. Where once complicated machinery and gadgets were needed to analysis the habits of the canine, now a simple phone can manage it all.
The second use is when I travel abroad and my family wants to know where I am. Nokia’s Sports Tracker can upload your route to a social network website (http://sportstracker.nokia.com/) where you register as a user, invite your friends, and share where you’ve been with them through the mobile component. All very Web 2.0, but it clearly answers the question “Where’s Dad?†when he’s off bouncing around conferences on the west coast. If I’m feeling particularly ‘open source’ I can turn live tracking on and give a constant “Ewan is here†report.
(Hmm, that might be something to consider for running in the background come prom night….)
So let’s not be blinkered to straight text messages coming into a handset as being the vanguard of mobile messaging. Modern communication is two-way, and the data we can provide is but limited to the sensors we can add to a mobile device.
by Ewan Spence
December 16, 2007 at 6:53 pm · Filed under Wifi, WIMM
I’ve been watching the posts on the idea of what is a mobile message and the surprising thing to me is that we’re almost all focused on the mobile phone as being the receiving platform. When we consider the technology on sale this festive season, I think it’s wrong to assume that the smartphone will be the sole preserve for mobile messaging.
Some of the biggest technology sellers this year have messaging included in them, but seem to slip under the radar. Two significant examples in my mind are both in the portable gaming sector; the Sony Playstation Portable and the Nintendo DS. While the devices are primarily set p for gaming, they both are showing the way forward for connected consumer electronics.
The Nintendo DS ships with a built in messaging client, able to talk to any other DS within range, as well as being able to play both local multiplayer games over wi-fi, and also multiplayer over the internet via connected hot-spots. The PSP goes even further, coming bundled with a full flash-enabled web browser, and an RSS podcast to automatically download audio and video.
Heck the iPod touch is nothing more than a glorified MP3 player, yet it carries a web browser that lets you grab email online, use an instant message client and do all those message-y things we’re talking about.
The common factor in all of this is the Wi-Fi connectivity, not a GSM signal to a mobile phone, and I’m sure we’ll see more and more electronics in the next few years being ‘internet aware’ and the opportunities presented by that are going to drive huge changes in mobile messaging. What shape we’ll end up with, well that’s going to make the journey interesting.
by Paul Ruppert
December 13, 2007 at 5:26 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Messaging
What defines a mobile message?
By most views the question is rooted in technology. After all, the nomenclature here is technologically driven, and the interests in such a discussion are filtered through the lense of how the technology enables and drives a service to users. By definition then, the message is the service, and the routing is “mobile.†The common filters are a) Network, (b) device, or (c) transport defined.
Given that most techies are linear thinking, a mobile message then is defined by how the message is delivered, e.g., via a communications network enabling “unteathered†communications whether voice or text. The question then is readily answered: A mobile message is a text based communication delivered via a macro wireless area network while the consumer is “mobile.†Pretty simple.
Not really.
If the first condition of mobile messaging is being unteathered, how then do you define a wireline originated text message as they have in Germany and the UK? There SMS can be originated and delivered via a desk top, wireline phone. No mobile network transiting in this scenario.
How about WiFi originated and delivered text messaging? You may be sitting in a Starbuck’s roaming on the T Mobile Hotspot with your UMA (unlicensed mobile access) enabled handset such as a Blackberry Curve or HTC Dash. Type a text, which is then transferred from the Starbuck’s router, then to an IP network, then to the wireline or even a Cable TV provider such as BSKYB, and displayed on the recipient’s flat screen tv, or sent to the desk top wireline phone. No transiting of mobile network there. Must not be a “mobile†message then since it isn’t running over a mobile network. But wasn’t the sender “unteathered?â€
My point is equally pretty simple. There’s no “mobile†message. It’s just a message, specifically a text. With early stage technologies and services there’s often a need to define the service through some technical filter. Initially there’s value in that but overtime the syntax losses value with changing conditions. Initially in the “wireless†or “mobile†industry, a “mobile message†was differentiated from a “voice message.†But as texting has taken off, such filters really don’t provide much value any more. The definers are more basic: Voice and Text. Oral. Visual.
The “Networkâ€
Nor can the “mobile network†no longer be viewed as the differentiating filter. Consider Swisscom, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. To them there is only “The Network.” Notwithstanding their offering of “Fixnetâ€, “Mobile†or IPTV services, there is only “one network†according to Thomas Jakob, VP of Innovation for Swisscom Outpost in Palo Alto. While meeting with Thomas yesterday I asked him to opine on the what defines a “mobile message.” “Irrespective of transport network, it is a text message. That should be the only definer.”
With the broader convergence, or blending, of “mobile” and internet access, the reality is that the message accessing is obviously going to change. As I’ve argued before, “Is Text Messaging Terminal” and “Future of Mobile Messaging“, SMS will remain the enabling platform but which “pipe” and which “access point” will vary. But the value proposition to the consumer remains the same: a short, targeted text is tough to be beat.
The value is in the text, not the delivery method, nor the status of the consumer’s locality or contextuality. No need to apply “mobile” to messaging any more. I agree with Thomas, there is no further need for “mobile” as a definer.
What do you think?
by Russell Shaw
December 12, 2007 at 7:39 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Messaging
OK, now it’s my turn to describe what a mobile message is. Or, at least my view of what a mobile message is.
I think the definition of a mobile message depends on how the message is sent and received than any characteristic of the message itself, or the device being used to send or receive said message (s).
This is real simple. If either the sender or receiver is in motion during the composition, transmission or arrival of this message, then we are talking about a mobile message.
If I am at my desktop, and I am texting your cellphone, that’s a mobile message. It doesn’t matter that I am at a fixed location. You’re not, so the message qualifies.
But what if I am at my desktop and text your cellphone while you too, are at home? It’s not a mobile message.
Why? After all, a growing legion of folks go without landlines and use their cell as their home phone as well.
If I am using my laptop’s WiFi capability from a Starbucks, to call up my Web-based email and send you an email to your home PC or your BlackBerry, well, that’s a mobile message. Why? Because I, the sender, am mobile even though you may or may not be.
But if I am using my laptop’s WiFi capability from my home or office network and send you an email, whether or not what I am sending you a mobile message or not depends on whether or not you are out and about or not.
What’s even trickier: what if the message-sender forwards a message from a stationary (i.e. non-mobile) location, and the recipient only gets the message when they turn on their cell, PDA, WiFi or EVDO-enabled laptop, etc.
It depends where they are when they retrieve and read the message. Out and about, it is a mobile message. When the recipient reads her or his message over a mobile device used from home, they are not being mobile when they read the message. So in cases such as I have just described, we’re not talking about a mobile message.
Let me be clear: as I see this “what is a mobile message” issue, I define it not by the devices being used to send or receive the message, and certainly not by the message’s contents.
IMHO to qualify as a mobile message, either the sender or recipient has to be mobile when the message is sent or received.
Next entries �
