Tuesday, May 09, 2006

More pizza phones

If you thought I was kidding when I wrote about the narrow-minded inutility of what I have dubbed the Pizza Phone, I was. At least that’s what I thought until I read this, from Danah Boyd at Many 2 Many:

The next step in social technologies is mobile. Duh. Yet, a set of factors have made innovation in this space near impossible. First, carriers want to control everything. They control what goes on a handset, how much you pay for it and who else you can communicate with. Next, you have hella diverse handsets. Even if you can put an application on a phone, there’s no standard. Developers have to make a bazillion different versions of an app. To make matters worse, installing on a phone sucks and most users don’t want to do it. Plus, to make their lives easier, developers often go for Java apps and web apps which are atrociously slow and painful. All around, it’s a terrible experience for innovators, designers and users.

The only question appears to be, would you like a Hawaiian pizza phone or pepperoni? The rest of Boyd’s post gets into an interesting analysis of where Helio went wrong in its thinking about MySpace.