Matter/Anti-Matter

I am now a reverse switcher--I switched from a BlackBerry to an iPhone about six months ago, and now am switching back again. Why? Basically it comes down to the fact that the iPhone is really good at the stuff I do 10 percent of the time, but pretty poor at the stuff I do 90 percent of the time.

This is not to bash the iPhone. It has been a transformative device in the wireless industry and forced everyone else to up their game. It has shuffled the power structure among device makers, service providers, developers, and the broader ecosystem. But such a sophisticated device is a very personal choice, and people have very different priorities for something they use and carry around with them almost every waking hour. My phone is provided by and for work, and I primarily use it for work purposes, and for that I find a BlackBerry much, much more efficient.

Now after having a BlackBerry Bold for a week, I realize how much I was fighting with the iPhone the whole time trying to get it to do what I wanted, at the speed I wanted.

iPhone upsides

There are definitely some things the iPhone does extremely well: 

• Maps: The best out there. Invaluable for me, and I'll miss these, though the latest rev of Google Maps on the Bold does all the same things. It just misses that last bit of visual flair.
• OmniFocus: I'm not really a big app buyer, but this GTD-based task manager is the one app that I use every day. I will lose it on the Bold, and I will miss it. (I'll continue to use it on my Mac.)
• Photos: I love how conveniently I'm able to synch my Aperture photo library with the iPhone, and the experience of showing photos on the screen. It's not something I do that often, but it is very handy when I want it. (I'm mystified why it's relatively laborious to get photos off the iPhone and into Aperture, though, requiring a manual import process as though it were any other SD card.) The imminent Desktop Manager for the BlackBerry promises similar photo (and music) syncing.
• Facebook: The iPhone Facebook app is mostly very good (though often hard to get a refresh), and the new version looks to be even better. But the current FB app on the Bold works very well, is actually faster than the iPhone one, does everything I need, and I find more intuitive to navigate.
• Safari: It's the best mobile browser, and while it has its downsides in general it works very well. But I don't do much mobile Web browsing, it's just not that much fun--still slow and inconvenient, and only worthwhile when there's nothing else to do or you're in a pinch. In truth, it's often more pleasant to look at mobile-specific versions of Web sites like NY Times and Southwest, than it is to try and look at the real page. They load faster, require less scrolling, strip out the advertising, etc. In fact, looking at NY Times mobile is faster than using the NY Times iPhone app (though it doesn't allow caching, but I was never organized enough to cache ahead of time anyway).

iPhone downsides

Now for the things I dislike about the iPhone:

General Usability

• Typing is what I do more than anything else on the iPhone, and it's the thing that causes me the most frustration. It's my No. 1 reason for switching. If I could get on with the touch screen, I would probably keep it. But I just don't like the touch screen. I am literally 3 times faster typing on the Bold, which has an excellent keyboard. No matter how much I "just trust" the iPhone, the number of typos and deletions I have to do is just unacceptable. Yes, it's all well and good to have smart predictive typing, but it keeps doing "fir" instead of "for," "sane" instead of "same," and so on. The horizontal keyboard helps, but then you only get a few lines of text to actually look at, and it's slow to switch when you rotate the device, and sometimes seems to get stuck in horizontal mode after I flip it back to vertical.
• Apple's insistence on the "simple" paned interface is indeed easier to get started with than the Bold, which has more of a learning curve. But unlike the big Mac OS, which has all manner of shortcuts, there are none in the iPhone. You have to follow the tortured route from one app or function to another without shortcuts. This is my second biggest complaint. By contrast the BlackBerry UI is incredibly fast to use once you learn it, as you do a desktop OS. The lengthy menus and the amount of customization possible are intimidating at first, but you quickly realize they contain everything you could conceivably want in any context. The two convenience keys make it instantaneous to get to your most-used apps.
• Fingerprints, earwax and general grime on the iPhone screen; it's constantly dirty and this both mars visibility as well as touch gestures.
• It's tricky to hold to your ear for more than a couple of minutes--too thin at the edge, and slippery. The Bold is bigger in width and thickness (a bit too big, IMO), but it is very secure to hold. It's not quite as well built as the iPhone, however.
• Poor battery life--it requires charging every 1.5 days for me, with 3G on most of the time, no Wi-Fi, and only a few calls a day. Having said that, I'm not doing much better with the Bold so far, so we'll see how it does once I settle into a more normal pattern of usage.
• iPhone camera is very slow to activate (often 7 or 8 seconds for the animated iris to open). It often jogs when I press the poorly placed onscreen button (causing blur) and my finger often gets in the way of the lens. There's no flash, no white balance or exposure control, basic photographic features that have existed in other phones for years.
• It's not that good of an iPod: Using it while it's locked is a pain. Using it in a pocket is a pain. No way to switch off coverflow (as on the Nano)
• No expandability. No card slots to add memory, you have to buy a whole new phone. With the Bold I can add 8 or 16GB micro SD cards for a remarkably low price.

The iPhone represents an interesting paradox that often comes up in usability testing: the UIs that are perceived as the best to use are not always the fastest. However, over time, people's opinions often change from their first impressions as the things that didn't seem that big of a deal at first, and which perhaps aided initial ease of use, now become barriers. At this point, enjoyment drops off dramatically. That's what happened with me. I was ready to throw the iPhone against the wall a few times because of how slow I found it to use, even as I appreciated its visual loveliness.

E-mail

• Shuttling back and forth to look at each e-mail account separately drives me batty. If I'm in my work e-mail account and want to see if my personal e-mail has anything new, it takes four clicks. And then four clicks to get back again to my work account. It takes no clicks in Blackberry to do the same thing because it unifies all e-mail accounts (and texts and IMs) into a single "feed."
• I have to unlock the iPhone to see if I've got a new e-mail, and remember the e-mail unread count from my last time looking at it (for each account). This often takes 30 seconds of constant interaction or more--not a big deal, it may seem, but it pulls my focus away from whatever else I was doing more than it should. The notification light on the Bold tells me at a glance when new mail (or SMS or voice mail) has arrived, saving me the trouble of picking it up to check.
• The iPhone Sent e-mail folder doesn't get populated in real time, and if I want to find a recent message I sent, I have to wait for it to download from the server. This can take several minutes if it's been a while since I looked at my Sent folder. On the BlackBerry, sent e-mails are included inline with received messages, making them easy to go back to.
• iPhone has no customization of font sizes for e-mails (message list, or within a message). With such a large and high-res screen, why can I only see less than five messages at a time if I have the message preview on with two lines? (Reduce message preview to one line and it goes up to...six messages visible! And still only eight if I turn off preview entirely.) That's just a ridiculous waste of space, and means I have to do a lot of scrolling. On the Bold I've got it set so I can see 13 messages at once.
• No auto-text/shortcuts to speed up repetitive message elements (e.g., On the Bold, I have created a shortcut sig and typing it at the end of an e-mail will fill out a signature as needed. On the iPhone you can only have one signature, and it's applied every time or never. And the Bold will let me create any other number of text shortcuts--mtg for meeting, fdi for frog design, inc. and so on). I was stunned when I got the iPhone that it couldn't do this, searching in vain for a way to accomplish it. (Third-party apps exist to do it in an extremely hacked way.)

Calendar

• Entering new appointments takes way too many steps due to the iPhone's modal-paned UI approach. On the Bold, it takes two button presses beyond the typing of the event name; I can be in and out of creating an appointment in a few seconds. Also the BlackBerry does simple things like allow a default setting for meeting reminders, where on the iPhone I have to select that every single time (I always want one). The numeric keypad on the BlackBerry makes entering times and dates much faster than the iPhone's gimmicky and finicky slot-machine style tumblers.
• No week view. This is my most frequently used view after day view, and not having it is a real pain for planning purposes. The iPhone's month view is next to useless.
• No snooze for meeting reminders, a huge miss
• Can't jump to a specific date in the distant future, have to tediously scroll or switch to and from month view. Why can't I swipe sideways on a day to skip to the next day, like with everything else on the phone? On the Bold, press G (go to date) and enter the date, done.
• Where in the day new appointments get inserted seems random. Sometimes late in the day or where an appointment is already placed, or even will default to a time in the past! With all the CPU power, you'd think it would at least just look for the next open slot. And why can't I double tap an hour in the day and activate a new appointment at that time?
• Can't send comments along with appointment acceptance/decline notices--a frequently needed ability to add nuance to the person who requested the meeting. 

Phone

• On the iPhone, dialing specific contacts is rather tedious if they are not saved in favorites. On the Bold I just start typing their name and it finds the number and dials it. I found a third-party app for the iPhone that does something similar (thought not as well), but it's bizarre that with all this CPU and screen that Apple hasn't rethought this daily activity.
• Muting the phone while on a conference call is a multistep process that requires looking at the screen. The Bold requires just a button push on the top and can be done blind. Safer while driving, where muting/unmuting needs to be done frequently when on a headset. The Bold also has a nice note-taking feature while on a call, and I can e-mail notes to myself or others afterward.

I'm clearly in the minority with my gripes. Most people seem to love their iPhones. Like I said, I'm not trying to bash the iPhone and say no one else should like it; this is a very personal choice. But at least for the time being, the Bold is a much better match for my needs.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft are facing some dilemmas about what to do with their OSes when it comes to Netbooks.

The NYT’s Bits Blog spells out how the pricing for the iPhone basically turns it into a subscription, at least for people who want to upgrade their phone regularly. With the new prices and GS model announced Monday, there are now three tiers, as described by Bits:

• The $199-every-two-years plan. That gives you the base model of the most current phone hardware every two years. You have to suffer a year of jealousy when others have the newest phone and you don’t. There is a similar $299-every-two-years plan for the higher capacity phone.
• The $399-every-year plan (with an introductory rate of $199 the first year only). For four times the effective annual cost, you get the base model as soon as it comes out. Premium users may gravitate to the $499-a-year plan ($299 to start out) to be sure of having the very best model.
• The new $99-every-two-years plan, if you want to have last year’s model and keep it for two years. As I wrote Monday, this may go down to a $0-every-two-years plan next year.

Given that the average consumer gets a new cellphone every 18 months, this isn’t really different from what’s been going on for years, it’s just that the price-point is far higher. But it’s not out of line for other smartphones, and if anything Apple has been pushing prices down in the category — for launch prices at least. BlackBerry and Palm both had to launch the Storm and Pre, respectively, at the $200 pricepoint, or they wouldn’t stand a chance against the iPhone.

The difference is that in the past launch prices quickly dropped, sometimes to free, whereas Apple keeps them consistent throughout the life of a product generation. So while it puts pressure on competitors for their launch prices, it also opens the door for them to drop their prices over time, perhaps significantly undercutting the iPhone.

And for the record, I sympathize with a commenter on the Bits Blog post that it’s unfortunate that so many see resource-intensive products like cellphones as disposable on such a frequent basis. Granted, they get beat up a lot being handheld and portable, but upgrading is by far the most common reason. I have to plead guilty as charged here too, though I generally hang on to a phone for more like 3 years (my Sony Ericsson has a cracked screen, but otherwise I still use it).]

An article in the New York Times says customers are being more attracted to "simple" products:

And, as it turns out, the buyers of consumer electronics could very well have been a leading economic indicator. Over the last year, they chose to buy two inexpensive and simple products, the Wii and the Flip, over competing gadgets bristling with more features.

But the article conflates two different definitions of "simple"

• Doing a focused function or small number of functions (i.e. it's "simple in what it does")
• Being easy and intuitive to use (i.e. it "simple to use")

The article cites a number of examples including the Wii, the iPhone, the Flip camcorder, and the Sonos multi-room music system. These products represent a spectrum of the different meanings of simple, but the article conflates them all together as though they were equivalent. If you're making decisions about how to approach a new product design, this is a very dangerous thing to do.

The Flip camcorder is very simple in what it does. It has removed all but the most essential functions of being a video camera, which has a knock-on effect that it is easy to use just because there is very little to learn about.

The iPhone is far simpler to use than any other smartphone out there, but it is very complex in what it does. With the App Store, that complexity grows every day. Indeed, if Apple had come out with a greatly de-featured smartphone, it would not have been a smartphone at all.

The Wii is not significantly easier to to set up or less complex than the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3, but they have put their emphasis on a different kind of game play than the "technical" type of games with steep learning curves that tend to dominate on the other platforms. This makes it easier to get started with playing the games themselves.

Which brings us to an important point: at the same time these devices are removing things, they are adding others. In the case of Flip it faciliates spontaneous use in a way that traditional large and expensive and complicated camcorders do not, and it can be customized with a very cool website to make it more of a fashion accessory. The iPhone added a new interface paradigm with its multi-touch, gesture-based touchscreen, and was able to push back the layered complexity that the wireless carriers tend to impose. The Wii brought joy back to video games with control accessories that use physical movement beyond one's thumbs, and which encourage more personal collaboration and competition than one gets from a first-person-shooter.

These additions have allowed the products to open up new market opportunities and reach customers that have stayed away from less convention gadgets in each category. But it's not just the removal of things to make the devices simple that's achieves this, at least as important is the judicious addition of evocative capabilities.

Sonos is in some ways is a counter-example: It's well designed and much simpler to use than the usual cobbled-together solutions for get multi-room audio using a PC as a music source. If simple was all it took to appeal, then they should have done much better. In fact it took additional complexity -- creating an iPhone app that allowed the iPhone to replace Sonos' custom-built remote (which also contains a scroll wheel and a color LCD, not unlike an iPod -- to goose sales, according to the article.

The common denominator throughout all of these is ease of use, and a new twist on the experience of using the product. But don't make the mistake of thinking that "simple" just means removing functionality. Sometimes that's appropriate, but other times it's exactly the wrong thing to do.

NY Times article

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the new Palm Treo Pro, and I was fairly critical of the new smartphone. Why? Basically because I felt that it was good, but good isn't good enough in today's dynamic smartphone market. To delve a bit more deeply into this I thought it might be interesting to use the Kano model to examine this further.

The model, named after its inventor, Professor Noriaki Kano, provides a simple way to think about how products meet or exceed customer needs, and differentiate themselves against the competition.

The model consists of two axes. On the vertical axis is degree of customer satisfaction. On the horizontal axis is how well the feature or capability was executed, from poorly/not at all, to very well done.

Onto this we can plot three different types of needs -- Excitement, Performance and Basic:

Performance needs: These are primarily quantitative things about technical performance (mpg, 0-60, hold-time on a customer service call), and are often easily articulated by customers and are top-of-mind. For the sake of simplicity this is averaged out to a 45 degree angle - in other words product performance and execution matches customer expectations in a linear manner in a chicken-egg cycle.

Basic needs: Expected features which customers take as a given (and are therefore usually unstated). Having them does not improve your position, but leaving them off results in harsh assesments. Even the best execution on basic needs leaves a "neutral" assessment by a customer. So basic needs have diminishing returns over time, and always stay at or below the horizontal axis.

Excitement needs: These are the "wow" factors that differentiate from the competition by achieving something that customers had never even thought of but which have obvious benefit. Presence of exciters is a big differentiator, but lack of them is not a disappointment as they are not expected. By definition, excitement needs start above the middle point.

It's such a fine line between stupid and clever

I wrote a post a couple of years ago riffing off the classic line from This is Spinal Tap - basically the idea being the it's not always easy to tell when an idea is good or bad, and often the timing of it makes all the difference.

Kano posits the same thing: needs change over time - exciting becomes performance becomes basic.

When telephones first came out, people were ecstatic that they could talk with friends without leaving the house. It didn't bother them that the phone was attached to the wall and they couldn't stray more than a couple of feet from it. It just wasn't necessary to have a cordless handset with a built-in answering machine. These things came along later as the technology matured. But if you tried to introduce a tethered handset now (outside of an office setting), forget it. (Though I have to admit we recently bought one for our house, for $9 from Radio Shack, because we wanted an emergency phone for earthquakes...)

In the case of the Treo Pro, my take is that it is delivering well on the Basic and Performance Needs. In other words, it checks all the right boxes for what a smartphone needs to do at this point in time. But what it lacks (except for perhaps current Treo users, who are happy it exists at all) are "wow" factors like the iPhone's touchscreen and gorgeous UI, or Android's promise of endless developers, or the much lower price of some other smartphones. It's not bad on anything, it's just not outstanding. And because this is its position on day of release, the market context will just get worse for it over time. The smartphone market is at an inflection point right now of shifting from niche to mainstream, and lots of competitors are going to start piling on. This will result in a quickening pace of exciters shifting to performance and basic. It happened quickly in the cellphone market (just as Motorola how much luck it had keeping up after the initial success of Razr), and will happen at least as quickly in smartphones.

So the Treo Pro is a good phone for right now. But Palm needs to get its skates on, because the clock is ticking.

Underwhelming--that's the word that comes to mind when I look at the new Palm Treo Pro.

Yes, nicer looking for sure, with a strong influence from the lower-cost Centro model (and looking rather like the upcoming BlackBerry Bold). It also has 3G and Wi-Fi, which is great, the newest version of Windows Mobile, and GPS, though these can also be found on existing competitors. So it's got a decent package of features, but what's so compelling about it that isn't offered elsewhere?

In this day and age, offering a screen that takes up less than 50 percent of the device, especially with as big borders around it as the Pro has, just doesn't cut it. I'm not suggesting touchscreen only here, as I definitely prefer typing on a physical keyboard to tapping on a virtual one, but really, even a business-oriented device like this one is going to be used to show off photos, look at Web pages, etc., which all benefit from a large screen. The 320x320 screen has been the Palm standard for years now. Heck, even the Palm Tungsten T3 I had four years ago had a 50 percent bigger screen, albeit without a physical keyboard. The Pro's screen already looks small, and will look even more diminutive over its product lifecycle given how slowly Palm brings out new models.

Size-wise the Pro is almost identical to a BlackBerry, though longer. It's fatter than the iPhone. So there's no real advantage in pocketability or bragging rights there.

The talk time and battery life are good, but the 2-megapixel camera is ho-hum.

In this video Palm talks about how the Windows interface is great because it mimics what people are used to on their desktops. Ironically, as Rob Haitani, the software architect for Palm back in the day, used to say: the whole philosophy of the original Palm OS was that you should not try to mimic a big-screen mouse/screen environment, because it was not optimized for small-screen direct touch interactions. Transferring desktop interaction patterns onto a handheld was just not efficient, and that's why the early versions of Windows Mobile were slow to use. Now that it has adopted the Windows platform exclusively, Palm has to sing the opposite song.

Palm got a lot right in its earliest models, but it has struggled to stay innovative and focused in the last few years.

In the video, Palm also talks about how it wanted to take care of all the little details. It looks like the company has done that. But by focusing on the small things Palm's come up with a device that treads water in the market. There are no big things that really push the boat out further compared with other smartphones. There are no marquee features that really stand out in an increasingly large and diverse crowd. With the current state of the smartphone market, that's just not good enough to move the needle on Palm's dwindling market share and attract new customers to the Palm brand.

In anticipation of the new iPhone release, Stuart Henshall has some interesting thoughts on "The Mobile Social World of Presence:"

"I've been thinking recently about my connectivity and mobility and one of the reasons I keep coming back to it is the dissonance I have when looking at the two mobiles I use most often. There's now been many comparisons made between the Nokia N95 and the iPhone. Both best in class so to speak. However, I've struggled to completely understand why the iPhone beats the N95 (for me and I'm also really betting for many others). The N95 ostensible has it all. Better camera, streaming bluetooth, video, decent headphone jack, better speakers and general sound etc. It has messaging and mail etc. I could go on and the comparisons which have been made before.

However, the real reason in my mind that the iPhone wins is its ability to 'stay in social touch.' The email, the SMS, the browsing experience has enabled much of the behavior that social networkers have mastered already on the laptop or desktop. It's not about the technology, it is about how the device helps you socialize.

(...) Devices that keep us more connected and 'loosely connected' without pressuring us to wear a heads up display are going to win over those that just add a better camera. In the end it is about the conversations, the chatter, and the ability to engage wherever you are. I even find the iPhone works well as sort of a second screen...for glances at email updates, entering Twitter updates etc. In that way it is supplementing my desktop."

Read the full post

A recent Gartner study estimates that 189 billion mobile messages have been sent by U.S. mobile-phone subscribers in 2007. It forecasts 301 billion mobile messages sent in 2008.

If correct, those figures would still account for only a small fraction of the 2.3 trillion messages to be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (a 19.6 percent increase from the 2007 total of 1.9 trillion messages). Asia is the biggest mobile-messaging market worldwide. China is in the lead, with approximately 560 billion SMS messages sent in 2007, followed by the Philippines' 430 billion and Japan's 190 billion.

The vast majority of the 189 billion mobile messages to be sent in the United States are expected to be SMS text messages, with an average use of about two SMS messages per U.S. subscriber per day. That is similar to the level of SMS activity in the United Kingdom in 2005 and still only at the global average of 2.1 SMS messages per day. The average number in the U.K. today is six SMS messages per day. Singapore is at 12, and the Philippines even at 15.

While the U.S. is still lagging behind Asia and Europe, its adoption of SMS is obviously accelerating. Gartner predicts that this will further propel mobile-payment solutions, as SMS will continue to be the dominant channel for mobile payments.

The analyst house believes that the number of consumers making payments using their mobile phones is set to soar from 32.9 million in 2008 to 103.9 million in 2011.

Despite the continued growth of SMS usage, however, Gartner expects growth rates to slow as direct mobile connections are becoming increasingly cannibalized by mobile-IM communities and social-network portals.

As I wrote before, there is huge potential for an elegant, seamless, cross-platform, and cross-media IM solution that enables the ideal of the "never-ending conversation."

It looks like Apple might again be the first mover here. The company is apparently developing a chat application for the iPhone, as revealed recently through a patent application that describes a "portable electronic device with a touch-screen display, comprising (a) means for displaying a set of messages exchanged between a user of the device and another person in a chronological order." That's basically the description of an UI for an iPhone IM application.

CNBC analyst Jim Cramer thinks that an iPhone IM application is going to be to instant messaging what the iPod was to the Walkman. And Ars Technica is not alone when it suspects that most of the iPhone users will probably value "a way to use instant messaging without using up their SMS message quota."

While the iPhone currently relies on SMS, Apple could add AIM, Jabber, or Twitter to the interface and thus become the de facto universal conversation enabler. However, building a native IM application (and adding third-party chat applications) could create conflicts with iPhone operators that might be concerned about losing potential SMS revenue, if users sidestep SMS by using IM programs.

We will soon find out. The momentum is building up toward a possible unveiling of the next-generation iPhone at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference on June 9.

I caught a few of the later sessions today at the Emerging Communications (eComm) conference in Mountain View, and the program was pretty good. The rigorously enforced commitment to micro-formats--a mix of five-minute lightning talks, 15-minute sessions, and 20-minute keynotes--worked out well: The presenters were forced to condense their thoughts to the core, and a wide range of viewpoints could be heard during the course of the day. Even the five-minute shorts were informative and sparked follow-up conversations.

For Luca Filigheddu from abbeynet, the five-minute limit was a natural fit for his topic, "Micro Video-Blogging and the Future of Online Conversation." He managed to squeeze a lot of numbers into his blitz pitch: 75,000,000 videos on YouTube; 100,000,000 existing blogs; 500,000 users on Twitter (he wasn't sure if that's accurate; I'm not either). Referring to 160 characters as the border between blogging and micro-blogging, he argued that 60 seconds might be the new border between micro video-blogging and video-blogging and that "every company ought to have a micro video-blogging strategy."

Filigheddu's presentation was part of larger theme: the socialization of mobile communications or the emergence of the conversation in and beyond telephony. In this vein, Sam Aparicio from Angel.com, in his talk on "Fixing Group Communication," presented some inspiring riffs on the "social phone." My first thought was to discount the notion of a social phone as a contradictio in adjecto, as they used to say in Rome, because phones are inherently subscribed to an individual identity with highly customizable preferences and self-expression needs. But that's exactly where Aparicio was headed: future modes of communication will reconcile personalization and socialization and turn the phone into a group communications tool for both individual and collective use. While today's communication tools are centered on one specific mode of communication and enable a single communication protocol to occur, the future--so Aparicio--belongs to communication devices that support conversations. And by pinpointing the attributes of conversations, he illustrated how far away we still are from such tools: Conversations go on for a long time; they may start anytime, anywhere, with anyone; and other people may choose to join them.

The most interesting point he made, though, was that conversations can start in one medium and continue in another. Imagine a conversation via IM that continues in e-mail (Gmail allows for that already), or a Wiki entry that continues on Twitter and then on the mobile phone before it ends on Facebook. This transgressive, transmedia type of communication that supports all kinds of communication artifacts poses a huge challenge to the industry and requires the solution of the "identity issue"--the portability of a single-user ID across different platforms and media. David Recordon from Six Apart provided a good overview of the current attempts to establish community standards in this regard. From OpenID to hCard parsing to Mobile OAuth to DiSo (distributed social networks), and OpenSocial--the conversation will be televised, telephoned, teleconferenced, and it will just have one name.