Back from the holidays, here’s the next chapter from Geeks Bearing Gifts, posted for free on Medium. Spoiler: I say this is a chapter about mobile but instead it ends up being about understanding different use cases for news, no matter the device or medium. I argue that thinking of mobile as just another content-delivery medium is short-sighted. Mobile is about context. Instead of organizing our services around platforms, we should be organizing them around people and their specific needs. A snippet:
Usage and traffic for mobile is fast outpacing the web. Many news sites see or are about to see a majority of their traffic from what is classified as mobile. I had a conversation with a Google executive in which I whined about functions I wanted to see added to their web services and he pshawed me, dismissing the old web as practically passé. Google is devoting itself monomaniacally to mobile, where it provides us with no end of useful and specifically built apps — mail, maps, documents, calendar, photos, entertainment, communication — that all know me as a single user. Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, told The New York Times that he is deconstructing his big, blue mobile Facebook application and buying or building a chain of specialized new apps — like WhatsApp, Instagram, and the beautiful Paper — to lay atop his relationships with users and his data about them. Facebook’s apps are built for specific uses — one for checking updates, another for instant messages and chat, another for sharing pictures, and so on. Facebook’s apps all offer connections. Google’s apps all offer services. Both companies’ apps are built atop their relationship databases. Google and Facebook are in the relationship business. We are not.
Perhaps our problem in media is that we offer but one thing: content, or at least that is how we present what we offer. We make users come to single portals so crammed with our stuff it’s hard for them to find what they want, especially in cramped mobile screens. What Google and Facebook offer instead is context in the user’s terms: When you want to mail, you use the mail app; when you want to drive, you open maps; when you want to check in on friends, you open Facebook; and so on. Interestingly, both Google and Facebook have so far failed in their attempts to deliver news on web or mobile. Perhaps that was because they were trying to deliver our content without personal context.
What happens if we rethink the value of news expansively in the contexts of its many uses?
Read on for my answers in the rest of the chapter here. If you can’t wait for the rest of the book, then you can buy it here.
