Matt and Shulze were some of my favourite people to meet for the first time at Reboot this year. Their presentation drawn by Shulze, given by Matt really gathered up all the threads for me. Just a casual yet inspired presentation on everything that is important in design today. soak it up.
See the whole thing here including transcript. So happy they posted it.
Location is the next big thing in social presence. but are we there yet?
# Plazes introduced at Reboot their big new v3 redesign. Or I should say their new un-design of the usability chernobyl that was their version 2 website (it’s much better now). They’ve also added status messages, groups and more community features. Will this be enough to finally get them to critical mass? I dunno. Something about convincing me to maintain a whole other social network, community and buddy list just to share location data strikes me as, um unlikely. speaking of this problem…
# Dopplr also made a splash at Reboot. Dopplr is the twitter of travel. Add friends, add your upcoming trips and find out when you might be passing in the night (so to speak). I have many invites! email me if you want one. But again, great idea, lacking integration with my existing social networks. Paging mr facebook…
# Facebook, rapidly becoming the [English speaking] world’s defacto social platform, now has a location-based “Trips” application. It’s buggy and pretty much sucks at this point. But then it’s only about a week old.
So there you have it, great apps with no integration and great integration with no great app.
The race is on to set the standard in social presence locality. So it begins (though don’t forget upcoming.org, Garmin GPS etc. In reality, there are many niches)
[picture – Dopplr conversation on the lawn at reboot9. One moar pic]
# The UK is one of the world’s most competitive wireless markets
# Read it and weep. Orange here offers the blackberry 8800 for only 79 pounds with plan. The Pearl is free. Compare with Rogers here. ahem, not free.
# There’s wifi networks everywhere, mostly these are not free but they do explicitly offer and advertise skype and voip services for, example, nokia n-series phones.
# Carriers here and in europe actually offer the the wonderful nokia n-series phones. sigh.
# Wifi carriers partner widely. I’m posting this thanks to a 2 month boingo trial subscription (a great investment) I bought back in Miami Intnl’ 4 weeks ago and it’s given me unlimited access everywhere here.
# I don’t need to tell you about the data rates.