Killer Apps Are Social Habits

The mobile industry had huge expectations for MMS. Yes, it takes a little time to set up. Yes, it doesn't work well across all devices. But think of the opportunities - embedded photos, videos, music! Makes you want to abandon the traditional text-only SMS messages, right?

Wrong. Several years after its introduction MMS still trails behind conventional messaging. Even with all its limitations, such as very limited length, unreliable delivery and primitive text entry techniques, SMS is the clear winner in consumer's mind. It addresses the need for communication when a verbal conversation is impossible (lecture hall), unwanted (short notifications can turn into a lengthy talk) or simply too expensive. Multimedia Messaging tries to fulfill several additional needs, such as the desire for quick image sharing, but does so in a cumbersome and unreliable fashion that still limits its use to early adopters (at least, outside of Asia).

Why did this happen? A typical error of judgment that's so often seen in the software business - thinking that just because a feature exists it will be used by the customer. A user will rarely "turn down" a feature ("- Would you want to be able to send pictures and videos from your cellphone? - Yeah, sure..."), so the company (in our case, an industry) invests into its development. But what the customer wants is often not what he/she really needs, so the application is left unused, programmers gets fired and the CEO doesn't get a bonus for Christmas. MMS is a fine example of a technological advance that doesn't offer enough and is therefore sentenced to a mediocre existence.

The moral of this introduction is - technology should address human needs (the further this need is from the realm of technology, the better) to be successful. The phone addressed the basic demand for communication and became an instant hit, just as the Walkman (and later, the iPod) created its own niche aimed at helping people listen to the music they love. "A killer app is a new social habit", proclaimed a blog entry I read last year and I couldn't agree more.

The great thing is, not every mobile technology has been an MMS-like failure (although MobileTV and 3G Videocalls are heading into the same realm of advanced, unpopular features). Just like everyone on MobileMuse, I'm an early adopter of mobile technology and I notice that I've already acquired several new habits. Let me tell you of a couple times it made a difference.

I'll start with the mobile email, just because it seems so obvious and basic to me now (I probably check my email from the phone at least 5-6 times a day). I managed to negotiate a hotel contract for a conference I'm putting together while traveling in an Eastern European country. I did all the typing from an Internet Cafe, but only had to go there after I thought through my responses and replies to the hotel management.

Then there was another conference where I was a delegate. It took place in a spacious forest cabin, away from the urban world. A board of executive members of that organization got together to promote another one to their ranks - their compendium required two letters of reference. It turned out that both paper copies of one of the letters were lost and even though there were numerous laptops, noone could check their emails to get an electronic copy - there was no internet connection. The board of execs only got together every 3 months, so it was a big deal. It all worked out though - we called someone, who forwarded the .doc file to my email. Opera Mini, combined with GMail's document viewer allowed the member in question to read their reference letter out loud from the phone screen. She got promoted after!

The day after the conference, we went to an outdoors museum. At a large bus stop, we weren't sure which bus to take. While my friends ran around asking people for directions (and getting conflicting answers), I asked Google and had the required bus number within 20 seconds. In yet another case of mobile googling, I solved a row between two of my friends over whether Tuscany is in France or Italy. They've been arguing all day prior to meeting me (I thought Tuscany is in France, by the way). To sum it up, internet access from the mobile phone has its uses - even without GPS, maps and high-speed downloads.

It's only a matter of time before new social habits arise. If you meet someone at a cocktail party that seems to know a lot about you and your company, maybe it's because they googled it all up when they saw the business card you gave their friend. Good or bad, the age of mobile internet is right around the corner...