A SXSW brain dump via Bambuser threw up an interesting concept for me when Stef Lewandowski asked the question “is your mum on Twitter?”
That simple rhetorical question for me encapsulates the state of the Social Internet as it is. We have a whole raft of great apps available to us for free, but we as early adopters seem, in my opinion to have difficulty bridging the gap between what is a “cool application” and what an average web user can gain from it in his/her day-to-day life.
I was in the pub with a mate who’s a student at Leeds University. After listening to some of his tales of drunken misdeeds I quickly found myself evangelising tools like Twitter. Here I thought was a prime example of how an app such as this can be used to great effect, for one thing by the University itself. What is a lecture was cancelled? What if students needed a quick reminder that an important project was due? What if the local Rock Soc had organised a pissup somewhere? This is all fairly obvious stuff but there are myriad uses for it in and outside the education service.
What’s interesting is that, even for students who spend three years of their lives learning and developing so are not afraid of hearing about new developments in worlds that interest them, it’s very difficult to make the leap from “yeah, that’s cool; right, I’m off to the bar” and “yeah, that’s cool, what’s the address again?”
I wholeheartedly believe that everyone can benefit from such a unique app, but that’s not true of the entire Social Internet. The beauty of Twitter is that you don’t need to be connected to the Web after you’ve signed up: you can do everything via SMS, and even my mum’s got a mobile.
So do the monitor and keyboard form the barrier between great services and the digitally bewildered? My mum sends emails and maintains a blog (would you believe) but using my dad as a proxy, so she never really uses the Internet; but she’ll happily send a text on her mobile. So does it just come back to the fear of breaking the Internet, or is it just too much effort? If you could plug your camera into your TV and upload your photos via your digibox, would more people start using Flickr for example?
These questions can’t be answered for all sites, especially when you get onto social media behemoths like Spacebook or MyFace, but these often contain elements of other sites (Facebook status vs Twitter tweets, MySpace Music vs Last.fm etc).
Google are starting to understand that the beauty of the Internet is such that you don’t need to be sat infront of a 17" screen to experience it, and in the case of some of Google’s telephony services you can take a screen of any size out of the equation entirely.
So do the early adopters need to bridge the gap or should it be on the heads of the app developers to make their services available without the big scary screen?