Many of you may know that I record and upload my vidcasts exclusively from my Nokia E71 smartphone. I also use my E71 almost exclusively for reading my e-mail and 150 feeds, and accessing the only four social networks I am really active on — YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook. If you add to that my compulsive calendering and my total reliance on GPS even to navigate two blocks, you can imagine how big a role my E71 is playing in my life right now. In fact, I would say that the E71 has been my main computer for the last two weeks. For the most part, it has been great and I totally love it.
However, a phone is as good as the app ecosystem around it and there is no app ecosystem around the Nokia E71. It comes with half a dozen pre-installed apps and apart from the mainstream web services like GMail/ GoogleReader/ GoogleMaps/ YouTube/ Yahoo/ Flickr/ Twitter/ Facebook, pretty much nothing else works on it. As much as I love the E71, I can’t see it getting traction against the iPhone unless Nokia gets developers to write apps for it.
Saurabh has some interesting thoughts on the why and how of blogger review programs, including why Nokia might want to ship out Euro 500 phones to little read bloggers halfway across the world.
While Nokia’s blogger review program is great, it would become even better if the website becomes the hub for all social media conversation about Nokia. For instance, I own a Nokia E71, have written a (positive) review on it, and even started a daily vidcast using it. A little link love from Nokia might encourage me to continue to blog about my Nokia E71.
What do you think? Should blogger review programs be ‘push only’ programs or use a mix of both ‘pull and push’ tactics?
Quick Summary: Not only do I love my new Nokia E71 smartphone, I am also writing this post on it.
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I’ll not have access to a PC for almost a fortnight, starting August 1, and I was really worried - no blogging for a fortnight! - until I tried blogging from my new Nokia E71 smartphone.
I’m writing this post on my E71 on a Vodaphone GPRS connection.
It’s not the same as writing on a laptop, of course. The Wordpress administrative interface took a couple of minutes to load, the qwerty keyboard is a little cramped, I can’t cut and copy text and doing fancy formatting is somewhat cumbersome.
However, the page download speed is only a little slower than the speed on the Tata Huawei data card attached to my laptop. My typing speed is already quite nifty after a day of playing around with the E71 and I have made almost no typos in the entire post. The qwerty keyboard, in spite of its tiny size, is easy to get used to. The screen resolution is wide enough, without being a wow! factor, and the navigation is never confusing, even if it is sometimes cumbersome. If I really want to, I can even do some really fancy formatting, with a little effort.
Quick Summary: Read why language (English vs. vernacular), mode of access (Internet vs. mobile) and social dynamics (global vs. Indian) will be the three dimensions of differentiation for Indian social networking sites.
Most of the Indian social networking sites are basically India-focused Facebook/ MySpace/ Orkut/ LinkedIn clones. Such clones would only be popular amongst a small set of twenty-something Indians in metros who won’t want a clone anyways.
I also presented a typology of Indian social networking sites on a 2X2 matrix with Indian-vs-global social dynamics on the X-axis and Indian-vs-global user appeal on the Y-axis –
– and suggested that –
To really build an identity and a broad Indian user base for themselves, Indian social networking sites need to reflect the unique nature of relationships in the Indian society.
Three Dimensions of Differentiation: Language, Access and Social Dynamics
Based on the discussion in the comments section and on Twitter, Facebook and e-mail, I have realized that there are, in fact, three dimensions of differentiation for Indian social networking sites — language (English vs. vernacular), mode of access (Internet vs. mobile) and social dynamics (global vs. Indian).
Quick Summary: Read a soon-to-be-real scenario featuring imaginary Indian Social Media Outsourcing (SMO) company BuzzPundit to understand why SMO will be the next big business opportunity for India after BPO and KPO.
Imagine a sprawling corporate campus on the outskirts of a large Indian metro (take your pick from Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Gurgaon or Pune). Imagine 10000 twenty-something Indians sitting in front of their computer screens. If you must, think of a call center. Except that these twenty-somethings are not making call after call to customers in the US; they are reading articles, posts and comments and tagging them, or responding to them.
Welcome to BuzzPundit. You are at the corporate campus of one of India’s many social media outsourcing (SMO) companies.
Twitter, a popular microblogging service abroad, recently introduced an India number. Says Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder, “The people of India are very sophisticated when it comes to using SMS to stay connected.”
In Mumbai, Twitter recently inspired a ‘tweetup’, when Gaurav Mishra, a marketing professional and an “early adopter of technology”, wrote out a post saying “Blog meets are so passé. I want a Mumbai Twitter meet.”
Twitter’s destiny is, imho, to be acquired by a phone company and sold as a feature that gives users a reason to use one brand of phone over another.
Imagine if Nokia offered a cell phone with Twitter built-in, a checkbox for SMS users (default on?) — “Do you want to send SMS messages to your buddy list?”
Don’t you think the kids would go for that?
I agree with Dave that contextual tag footers on Twitter will be lame. All mobile companies I meet tell me that tag footers work, but I’m far from convinced.
What do you think? About tag footers on SMSes? About tag footers on Twitter?
