2006 Predictions 15 and 16

15. Mobile virus FUD will continue unabated, but with no real threat or impact.

16. Mobile blogging and photoblogging will grow, filling in a personal media-sharing gap intended for MMS.

MMS has never materialized as a replacement for SMS, mainly because it's not suited for the types of communication at which SMS excels. Marketing MMS as "like SMS, but with a picture" doesn't make it so. After all, how do I ask someone what they're doing with a picture -- and furthermore, why would I want to, particularly for a much higher cost than a simple text message?

SMS is great for simple one-to-one communications, perfect even. The ability to be able to send somebody a photo every once in a while is nice, but it's little more than that. With the rise of digital photos, sharing services and blogs, communicating via pictures has become a one-to-many activity, something to which P2P messaging isn't always well equipped. People like to share their photos -- look at Flickr, Ofoto, Xanga, Myspace, Facebook and so on. Melding the mobile with these types of services will grow, conspiring to still hold MMS usage down.

We've written before about applications like ShoZu that let people send their mobile photos to their own Flickr site, along with applications like Nokia's Lifeblog that let them post to their own blogs as well. These solve one side of the equation -- letting people share their photos from their mobile -- but the other side, accessing the shared photos from a mobile, is still a bit difficult. This is one place where an RSS-to-SMS service, like Yahoo's makes a great deal of sense. Replace sending multiple MMS with a single upload to Flickr, then Yahoo's service sends an SMS to all your friends when the Flickr RSS feed gets updated.

Instead of building their own moblog offerings or opening photo-sharing services based around pushing people to order printed photos, operators could instead leverage these existing services and help people better use them with their mobile devices. There's far more value in helping people get their photos onto an open system like Flickr or Blogspot than trying to fence them into a proprietary operator-labeled service. Nobody's going to send the same MMS with the same picture to ten different people anyway, so why not encourage people to use MMS (or whatever means) to upload the photo to a web service, then help them get word out to their friends' mobiles to come and look at the photo?

Photo and video sharing, along with moblogging are ideal uses for the mobile, because they're forms of communication -- the central characteristic of the mobile phone. But MMS isn't really the ideal medium. It can, though, instead of being a one-to-one service, be the platform for a one-to-many service. Facilitating this one-to-many sharing via mobile will be a hot market in 2006.

Comments

[Dave's Football Blog]

I really enjoy mobile blogging. I've been blogging NFL games from sports bars all season, using my Treo 650 and an IR keyboard. I'm able to take snapshots, upload them to my web site via FTP, and post them to the blog within minutes. If I had EVDO, FTP would be faster, of course, but I wanted to jump on the smartphone bandwagon before the season started.

Not everyone has a Treo, though, and mobile blogging won't take off unless the carriers and/or phone makers provide enough tools to help people post snapshots and text to the web in real time. We may see some very interesting apps in the next year or two, though.

[Andy Tiller]

Definitely agree with your proposed sharing scenario. The main issue is the cost of notifying your friends when you've posted stuff (someone has to pay for those SMS messages).

In places where the recipient pays (e.g. the US), you could upset some of your friends if you post too often to your photo sharing site, causing them to receive lots of SMS notifications.

In places where the sending party pays, then the service provider has to bear the cost directly, or pass it on to the end user. (This is presumably why Yahoo!'s free RSS-to-SMS service is only available in the US.)

IMS / SIP could potentially help solve this in future, with the possibility for a server to establish a direct connection to a mobile handset in order to push data to it.

On a related point, Cognima is building two-way data replication features into a future version of ShoZu. For example, when people visit your photostream on the
web and leave comments, you will be able to read the comment thread in the
ShoZu application on your phone. Comments are queued on the server and sent down to the phone whenever it connects (e.g. for a photo upload). The main benefit to users is that they can read comments on the move without having to
log in (via the phone browser) and check their account manually on
the off-chance that someone has left new comments (which, of course, often results in disappointment).