What the hell is “mobile?”

Lets put a stop to labeling, shall we? Blame it on politics, the media or pop culture, but as a society we’re obsessed with having a buzz word for everything.

When I started out in design, photoshop could solve all image ills.

Then, for a while there, aol was the Internet.

The Internet became super cool (and O’reilly became super rich) when web 2.0 ruled.

Now we’re off on “mobile.” It’s the “in” thing.

But like the rest of the labels, it’s sadly lacking in both meaning and accuracy. To some extent, every computer you own is mobile. Even the lowly home PC is mobile if you’re ambitious enough, and if you’re not, PCs almost not worth talking about – they’re losing relevancy faster than Paris Hilton.

So when you say mobile what do you mean? It’s not a trick question or a stupid one. Is it a laptop? A netbook? A tablet? A smart phone? A feature phone? An iPod? A watch? Or some combination of the above? Any one of them is quite mobile.

If we have to name them, lets try to be more specific. How about that. Let’s start labeling by capabilities, not portability. Let’s label by interaction type and size. Perhaps we can even imply some behaviors and usage patterns. How about this? Why not use device categories?

When people say “mobile,” don’t most mean “touch?”

Let’s do every senior exec in big business a favor and rid ourselves of at least one ambiguous buzzword. Let’s stop calling it mobile. (They can have html5.)

I was going through old photos on the computer. You know, of the kid as a baby, some of my old iphone screen shots and places I used to frequent. Then I came upon this:

What’s a phone camera rig? Glad you asked. Back before the iPhone, in a time when phones were dumb and people thought the Moto Razr was the second coming, it was awful hard to share your phone screen across the internet. I mean, we’re talking 2007 here.

That fact really sucked when you were trying to show off how a third party could build a widget for WHERE and make it instantly appear. Sure, you could point a web cam at a phone, but as soon as you hit a key, the shaking made the screen illegible for seconds.

Enter Legos. Matt Gross and I had a big demo and no good solution, so I ran out to the local Lego Store and picked up a set of I don’t know what. In a few minutes we had a rather stable rig that kept the phone still and allowed us to screen share with our iSight without a hitch.

WIN. Though we didn’t say that back then.

Good thing we don’t need to do that shit anymore.

As of today, the Public Radio Tuner is the most downloaded free music app in the store. It’s currently three places in front of another awesome music app, Pandora. In fact, it’s the 18th most downloaded app, right behind some app called Facebook (and who has heard of them?)

So why the sudden climb? Well, outside of the obvious – that it fills a need of hundreds of thousands on public radio listeners who until now couldn’t listen to their favorite radio station when they were out of tower range – it’s because Public Radio Tuner is currently featured under “New and Noteworthy” in the App Store. There’s nothing like the 10x accelerator of a worthwhile app being featured in the app store to make a move toward the top!

Congratulations to the Tuner team and collaborators! This is well deserved!

Read more about the tuner.

There’s been a lot of talk this week about Google’s new friend finding service, Latitude. As expected, there are two camps in the debate around the service: those people who think it’s awesome (they likely think everything else Google has ever done is awesome, too) and those who think Latitude is the perfect tool to enable stalkers to track down and eat their children and/or significant other.

I fall into neither camp.

Frankly, I think the stalking angle is totally overblown. Every story I’ve heard in the mainstream media about stalking via a mobile device goes something like this: A girl breaks up with her emo boyfriend. Said emo boyfriend suddenly knows everything his ex-girlfriend is doing. He says he can track her every move via her mobile phone, even when it’s off, so, like don’t try turning it off, because he can totally track her. And, you know, he just really loves her and everything and he’s not really stalking, because it’s love, right? He just wants to get back together!

The parents believe this is possible because they don’t really get the technology – they know it has GPS that can provide location so the leap to a kid who obviously understand technology better hacking into the phone isn’t a huge one. The kid believes it because, well, she’s a kid and probably thinks Law and Order is a pretty accurate slice-of-life-for-a-cop show.

More likely, the truth is he’s hiding in the bushes at night and showing up where she is because he’s physically stalking her with only the technology of a car or a bicycle. I spent the past three years with some ubersmart people making location aware mobile apps and I’ll tell ya, if they couldn’t hack into my phone or my phone’s network to locate me, the chance of your daughter’s obsessive techy boyfriend doing it is about zero. Seriously, play the lottery. You have better chances.

Then we have the “awesome camp” who think that friend finding, as an idea, is pretty darn cool. They see the possibilities of it. They imagine reliving college days always knowing where their friends are. They’d always know where the best party was because if their friends are all in the same place, its a good bet that’s a good party. That would be awesome.

There’s a million use cases they make just like that. My spouse wants to know where I am so s/he can start dinner at the correct time. My buddy wants to see if I’m at the bar yet, or if s/he has more time. My parents want to know if I’m home so they can call me and come see their grandchild. Etc. Etc. Etc.

The problem is that there is a big non-stalker related downside to always on. For all the millions of ways it makes life easier, at some point or another everyone – everyone – does something that they don’t want someone else to find out about. At the college party my girlfriend could be cheating on me. As I’m on my way home, I could be stopping to get a present for my wife right as she’s finding me and it could ruin the surprise (or worse, bring up pointless arguments). As for my parents, even though I’m home, I may not want them coming over.

In each case, once the friend finder bites me, everyone involved in the mishap has to make a decision about their future with the service. It comes down to this: what’s easier, changing habits so that I turn off the finder every time I do something “secret,” or just discontinuing the service? It’s a simple decision. Friend finders don’t really fulfill a need, they just make finding friends or loved ones a tad bit more convenient than making phone call, texting a message or emailing someone to collect the same information. And with Friend Finding, the risk of getting caught far outweighs the benefits, so I opt out. Once this happens to enough people, the critical mass (assuming there is one) disappears and the service as a whole becomes useless.

So, good for Google joining Loopt, Brightkite and Loki in the buddy finding parade. I predict the same fate for Latitude as their Dodgeball service – a shiny, seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time addition to the Google scrap heap.