Here is a further update of my previous post on mobile phone based social interactivity gaining momentum in the future. This latest article from New York Times covering the privacy implications of Google's acquisition of Jaiku has some great points about the potential of mobile as the centre point of a person's life (for further deep delving into this specific point Jan Chipchase is the man).
With regards to the privacy issue, being a Jaiku user myself, it is as idiot-proof as you can get - that is when you sign up there is a simple option to make your jaikus public or keep it private.
Here are some key snippets from the article:
"To begin with, the reasoning goes, Jaiku is not really about microblogging — those minimessages submitted by text or e-mail that made Twitter famous. Jaiku is “a mobile company in the business of creating smarter presence applications,” and therefore “a leader in a category most people haven’t fully grasped yet,” Tim O’Reilly, a technology conference promoter credited with the phrase Web 2.0, wrote in his blog.
Petteri Koponen, one of the two founders of Jaiku, described the service as a “holistic view of a person’s life,” rather than just short posts. “We extract a lot of information automatically, especially from mobile phones,” Mr. Koponen said from Mountain View, Calif., where the company is being integrated into Google. “This kind of information paints a picture of what a person is thinking or doing.”
In practical terms, Jaiku’s mobile application allows users to broadcast not only their whereabouts, but how the phone is being used, even what kind of music it is playing.
The information opens up a world of new mobile services for regular users, beyond the world of early adapters familiar with Jaiku.
Mr. O’Reilly’s example is the Web 2.0 address book, where the old address book is made into a live diary, constantly updated so that we can see, on our cellphones, where our contacts are and what they are doing.
Chris Messina, an open-source entrepreneur and founder of the consulting firm Citizen Agency, takes it a step further. In a blog post after the Jaiku deal was announced, he said that he envisioned a world where all information had migrated online, where the address book “lives in Googleland,” indicating presence in a way similar to the buddy lists on instant messaging programs, “and the data never grows old and never goes stale.”
“Instead of just seeing someone’s inert photo when you bring up their record in your address book,” he wrote, “you see all manner of social and presence data.”
One might, he suggested, “even get a picture of their current location."
"A holistic view of a person's life through all manner of social and presence data." - Can it possibly get any better for advertisers and their agencies to better understand their customers.
