I’m excited right now. But not as excited as I would be if I lived in the US. There are plenty of phones we get over here first in these green and pleasant dales, but two of the biggest gadget launches of the year are about to go down across the pond early next month, and they could point to where social media is headed in a big way.
I’m talking about the Palm Pre and potential new iPhone being released and most likely unveiled on 6 June and 8 June respectively in Yankville. What’s got the entire internet abuzz isn’t that the Palm Pre ups the megapixels or has built in DJ mixing deck (As Nathan Barley-esque as that is, Samsung is doing that). It’s the new operating system, webOS, which promises all the pizazz of the iPhone with brilliant integration of all your different contacts – and that’ll eventually mean everything from Skype to Facebook and Twitter.
Now, any big social network and platform will have mobile clients already, but nothing that weaves them altogether like new desktop clients are starting to – Seesmic Desktop for instance. You’d think someone would have it nailed for the iPhone already, but because it doesn’t allow programs to run in the background and hog all the battery juice, we’re still stuck in the stage of reactive mobile social media. In other words, you have to go out of your way to look at a specific social network on your phone.
What webOS will do, and ought to shake up other mobile platforms to offer, is tell you when people are talking to you, or talking about things you need to know about. It’ll do it unobtrusively too, scrolling across the bottom of the screen rather than bleeping off and getting all up in your grill every time someone throws you a virtual Frisbee on Facebook. Yes, it’s been done with the INQ1 phone on the Three network, but that’s a closed system, and not available in North America either, cutting out a large chunk of audience.
As for the iPhone? It’s unlikely to run background apps just yet, although there are rumours to that extent. But the new iPhone software will be bringing push notification, realtime alerts, to its apps very soon, which goes a long way towards achieving that same target.
What does this mean for social media? If what you need to know can come to you, rather than the other way around, wherever you are, you’re looking at better delivery of the keywords, topics and news that matter, reaching a wider audience than ever before, and you can bet that we at Republic will be riding that wave right from the start. I’m off to book a plane ticket…