Wednesday, August 04, 2004
TheFeature :: Why Mobile Services Fail
I'm busy at the moment trying to beef-up the methodology section for a research proposal, looking around for work that's been done on new metaphors for mobile services. I came across this feature by Howard Rheingold, who cites the work of Scott Jenson, talking about why mobile services, like MMS and WAP, have largely failed to take off because the designers (or maybe marketers) of these services are still looking backwards at what has worked before, rather than forwards at what might work next. MMS is not the same as sending a text message, so selling it in the same way doesn't work. WAP is not like browsing the web on a small screen, so again it just doesn't work. The strengths of these technologies (and there are some) lie just ahead of us, buried in ways of interacting that we haven't quite taken up yet. Jenson identifies 4 killer apps - I'll let you go and read about them yourself. my favourite is the textless text message: blank message with no text and only a time of sending still carries information to someone who is expecting it.
Jenson's own piece, Default Thinking, is due to appear in Harper, R. Palen, L.. & Taylor, A. (Eds), (Forthcoming 2004) The Inside Text; Social perspectives on SMS in the mobile age, Kluwer, Dordrecht, Netherlands
I'm busy at the moment trying to beef-up the methodology section for a research proposal, looking around for work that's been done on new metaphors for mobile services. I came across this feature by Howard Rheingold, who cites the work of Scott Jenson, talking about why mobile services, like MMS and WAP, have largely failed to take off because the designers (or maybe marketers) of these services are still looking backwards at what has worked before, rather than forwards at what might work next. MMS is not the same as sending a text message, so selling it in the same way doesn't work. WAP is not like browsing the web on a small screen, so again it just doesn't work. The strengths of these technologies (and there are some) lie just ahead of us, buried in ways of interacting that we haven't quite taken up yet. Jenson identifies 4 killer apps - I'll let you go and read about them yourself. my favourite is the textless text message: blank message with no text and only a time of sending still carries information to someone who is expecting it.
Jenson's own piece, Default Thinking, is due to appear in Harper, R. Palen, L.. & Taylor, A. (Eds), (Forthcoming 2004) The Inside Text; Social perspectives on SMS in the mobile age, Kluwer, Dordrecht, Netherlands
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