Live at OCS - Mobile Communities Breakout Session

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This is the first of two breakout sessions I'm going to attend. I'm skipping out on the "performance metrics" session since I'm tired of the metrics question.  From a conversation last night. "Your performance metrics (for collaboration) depend on the business goals of each project."... and that about sums it up.  What are your higher level business goals?  Those are also the goals you have around forming a community. If you can't find a match.. maybe you have the wrong business goals or shouldn't have a community.

1:36: Lunch is over.  Beef tenderloin and baked apples. Very tasty. 

Here are some notes from the breakout session I attended. It felt like such a new space that there were more questions raised than answers. 

  • Opportunity - Point of purchase information from consumer reports.
  • Problem - Restriction in joining mobile community like dodgeball if you don't know who your friends are on the service.  Social pressure not to join if you don't know you'll be welcomed.
  • Observation - No one replies to e-mails anymore, but will read and reply instantly to SMS messages.  I noticed this with my baseball team this summer.  The question was asked when SMS will "tip" and have the same spam problems as e-mail.
  • Most sites doing 1 way publish to SMS and some working on getting the 2-way read and publish to blogs thorough pictures.
  • Wonder why there aren't more voice applications in th mobile space.  Call up and leave a message at a location and listen to other people's messages?  Why isn't Vm trading more popular than texting?
  • Site: https://www.aula.cc/
  • Observation: Dodgeball will take over match.com as the biggest dating site.
  • Question: How much longer can carriers extort folks for SMS messages?
  • Text messages fit in well in the current users attention span. Even the character limit is almost a feature. You know they will be short and important.
  • Question: Is there really anything different for mobile communities other than just an extension of online?
  • Study referenced that said Americans don't adopt SMS because of the lack of public transportation. Most of us use phones while driving and in Europe they see the phones while waiting in public places. Makes culture for SMS bigger.
  • Nike story: They sent people from poster to poster in NY to get a prize and each poster had a new message to text in to get the next clue texted back to you.
  • Surprising lack of movement on micropayments.
  • Chinese depth of use information from lithium communities… looking at what’s most important to have and enable in mobile environment. They use everything. Carry all the time not open like laptop. Get instant fix of information. How can you give users a quick fix of their communities?
  • Chinese deployments get huge hits from mobile XHTML page uses. More than non CH deployments of communities.
  • Book recommendation: "Communities Dominate Brands"
    • Study of a TV station in Finland that just let people text in messages that where shown and read on TV. People pay for this and to have them read outloud.
  • What about mixing IM presence with location for cell phones?  Dodgeball, but in real time and hooked up to existing friends list.
  • How do I decide who gets all this information about me? Can I nominate best friends instead of just the people I chat with? 

That's about it. It was as fast as I could type. As you can tell there were more questions than answers.