What If The Mainstream Doesn't Want To Share?

[slitchfield]

Is 'sharing' a good marketing angle for the mainstream? In typically
controversial fashion, and with a good sense of Web 2.0 in the real
world, Ewan isn't so sure. What fraction of Nseries phone buyers, for example, are really going to get to grips with sharing online and geo-tagging?

Read on in the full article.

[Solnyshok]

Add to this - how about sharing your unlimited 3g bandwith with fellow citizens via mobile Joiku WiFi hotspot? )) (disregard battery life for a moment)

Sharing is pretty useful. Even though the percentages look pretty low, if 1% of the 22 milion Symbian handsets sold last year publish one post monthly, there are 220,000 posts each month to read...

The thing with sharing is, I want to control who can see what. I don't want the world to see everything. Yeah I blog some public stuff that is kept by flickr, vox, youtube and more. but I'd like my private stuff to be private. Not stored on a 3rd party server. Private as in secure datalinks between my privately managed server at home with encrypted channels selectively open to my friends and contacts.

So yes, the N95 webserver is a very interesting tool, but I'd prefere a vox-at-home box on a fat datalink... Nokia should sell me a SECURE home server too!

[krisse]

Even though the percentages look pretty low, if 1% of the 22 milion Symbian handsets sold last year publish one post monthly, there are 220,000 posts each month to read...

I think this is a key thing to bear in mind when discussing phone-related topics. You really don't need a big percentage in order to set up a viable business model, because the number of users is so staggeringly large.

Phones sell over 1,000,000,000 units a year, and if you add in people who use a phone from previous years and people who share phones, you're looking at something like 2 to 3 billion people worldwide who use mobile phones.

Even if a particular service attracts just 0.1% of phone users, that still means 2 or 3 million people using the service.

[kontraband]

yes, a small percentage number but not a small number overall.

Ive been sharing thru moblogs, forums, online chat, etc etc etc for many years, though the 'worth' of what I share is probably pretty minimal...

[malerocks]

Having the ability to share stuff online on the go is very handy. I like posting pictures to my blog on flickr and vox from my mobile. In fact last month i was at a wedding and posted pictures on the go. There were certain people i know who could not attend and they loved it when i shared near live photos.

"There are too many stories on the Internet of people suddenly discovering a wonderful feature on their phone and being amazed it works. "

Look at the iPhone. Suddenly a world of fanboys has discovered the SmartPhone, and thinks the iPhone is the most advanced phone in the world.

Coolest interface, sure, but most advanced? We all know different. All it's done is bring to the public eye a host of features that we've been using for years.

It horrifies me when I read the reviews of the latest greatest phones on various US web sites. Invariably some disheartened users post that the snazzy device they bought was crap, didn't work right, crashed etc. Reading between the lines most of the time it seems that they are not 'savvy' users, and they are overwhelmed by the complexity of the device.

Sartphones are fantastic, wonderful, amazingly versatile devices. But they are also far too complex. Even the iPhone is returned by masses of people who cannot figure out how to get it to work (no manual??). The number of users motivated to master smartphones of all flavours is relatively small comared to the number of people who purchase the devices - kind of like MS Word, where most of us can type a mediocre letter, but have no clue when it comes to charting, advanced formatting, stylesheets and a zillion other powerful features.

So what's the point of this ramble? Well, why would anyone be surprised by the 90/9/1% rule? Most users are happy to have a phone with a camera, and really don't need anything more. Some have more money than others, so they buy their perception of a Ferrari or Porsche in the phone world, just because they can afford it and they want to look cool. But they still only use it for the phone equivalent of the commute to work and a trip to WalMart.

Most people were in the old days just happy with a mobile phone. Period. Now unregistered expects a camera. Some still are...

snoyt

I think new features are good even if they appeal to smaller and smaller numbers of people but I do beleive that core features should be 100% perfect first.

To me there are so many 'bugs' or weaknesses with phones that the manufacturers should sort the problems out before they add more features....

[Dogmann]

Hi all,

Personally i think we are living in a fast evolving world where at last our devcies are powerful enough to deliver what we expect of them along with the faster data connections we now get as well. The emergence of fixed price data plans at reasonable cost and the abundance of WiFi along with the services that are becoming more accessible and user friendly. Once smart phones where the preserve of Buisness users and now we see the major growth in smart phones coming from the Multimedia user as this is what will drive our devcies fuhrer and faster. The easier and more accessible these things become the more people will start to use them so hopefully those figures will in not to long change.

Marc