Brian Grimal

The popular focus of today’s “social networking” craze centers on instant gratification.  Texting on cell phones, chatting in various forms, Twitter™ tweets, etc.  People are increasingly keeping in closer personal contact via impersonal technological methods.  Quite the gap bridging it would seem.

Then on the other end of the spectrum are message forums.  Popularized decades ago, they remain a very important part of keeping people in contact with other, but in a significantly different way.  The key power of message forums is persistence.  Texts, Facebook and MySpace messages, tweets, and the like by nature are exceedingly short, and not retained in an indexed fashion.  Forum threads are lengthier conversations, often containing much more content.  Full thoughts, structured conversations, informative discussions, things which can in the future be considered relevant reference materials.  

The future will fully bridge the gap between these popular aspects of modern communications.  It becomes quite obvious when you look at the largest communities, and how their feature sets are bent to fit.  Popular forum-based communities are installing chat applications.  Social networking communities are adding group messaging systems.  The lines are blurring, but there is still work to be done.

The next step, is to integrate how the information is delivered, responded to, and further located.  This means increasing mobile options.  A desktop user has all the ability in the world to use all available tech, but currently being on the go means giving up quite a bit of flexibility.  In my opinion, Apple has thus far given us the absolutely best mobile platform to make use of existing tech with the iPhone.  Were it not for their for-cost SDK, I would also feel they were best positioned for future developments as well.  There are significant opportunities for competitors to steal the show, and the market isn’t sitting on its hands.  Google’s Android, with the ultra-strong branding and corporate backing, coupled with being free and open source, stands well positioned to steal Apple’s thunder.  The biggest make it or break it will lie in the hardware.  Lets admit it, the iPhone is a sexy beast, and a very good water mark.

Just having a capable mobile device won’t be enough of course; apps will have to work and play the way we do.  We’re quick.  We’re agile.  We’re on the go.  We need the box to keep up.  I submit a handful of ideas to make this happen:

1. Shared presence information.  It does not matter which “service” we last utilized, it matters what we’re doing.  And when.  Maybe even where.  Our services need to find us, we don’t need to find our services.
2. Uniform identification and authentication.  We establish our “identity” all over the internet by signing up individual accounts.  What nonsense.  By and large, we either want to be known as ourselves, or we want to remain anonymous. 
3. Conversation management.  It’s frustrating enough to keep up with forum conversations on the desktop.  Email notifications are unreliable due to spam.  Instant notifications from dozens of active conversations can be intrusive and cumbersome.  We need a way to prioritize, group, and preference our notifications, tied directly to our current presence.
4. Lighten the load.  Fancy graphics just get in the way, slow us down, and clutter up the UI.  Enough with the pretty, it’s time to get back to work.
5. Search improvements.  The bulk of todays search is either a gross overview provided by the giants (Google, Yahoo, etc.) or a barely adequate keyword matching “search” on the site itself.  One is too broad, the other is too detailed.