The Crucial iPhone Cab Cluster
Posted by Petrice Gaskin at Jul. 17, 2008
Danah Boyd, has a great post on her blog about the iphone and the potential ways it can transform social interactions once it achieves a particular level of saturation in certain social clusters.
Boyd caught a cab with a driver who happened to be borrowing his cousin's gen1 iphone and seemed to be quite taken with the device and the potential it had to ease the difficulty of navigating LA's perilous traffic, as well as making it simple for him to connect and keep track of his fellow drivers.
Boyd writes:
Boyd caught a cab with a driver who happened to be borrowing his cousin's gen1 iphone and seemed to be quite taken with the device and the potential it had to ease the difficulty of navigating LA's perilous traffic, as well as making it simple for him to connect and keep track of his fellow drivers.
Boyd writes:
Cluster effects in mobile will be what happens when the LCD is not texting. From there, you can innovate. Sure, we're going to see a plethora of mobile social network sites and mobile location friend services and mobile dating and mobile media sharing communities. The first wave will always be a translation of the web. But once you have cluster effects, you can also start innovating and finding new services and tools that allow people to connect in meaningful way. New games can emerge. New social services. Innovation in this space will be iterative - it will involve throwing things out to the market and seeing what consumers do and do not do. It will require iterating based on their practices and not trying to shove those curvy creatures into square holes. But there's no point in leaving the starting block until cluster effects are underway because, sadly, iterating in imagination land inevitably leads to techno-utopian fantasies instead of meaningful applications.