IEEE Spectrum June, 2011 - 42

THE SOCIAL WEB

A Special Report

global shipments of
smartphones exceeded those of PCs for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2010.
The rise of mobile devices is indeed staggering in its pace and scale. Every day,
-carriers activate 350 000 phones running Google's Android operating system. An
estimated 15 percent of Google's search volume now comes from mobile devices.
More than 10 billion apps have been downloaded from Apple's App Store.
I N A WAT E R S H E D M O M E N T I N T H E H I ST O RY O F C O M P U T I N G,

Today a fierce battle is under way between Google's
Android and Apple's iPhone. But let's put that aside and focus
on how mobile technology is transforming the user experience. For many people mobile devices
are becoming the favored portal to their
online social lives. We're using our phones
to voice opinions, publish photos, play
games, and check on friends. More than
250 million users access Facebook on their
mobile devices, and 40 percent of all tweets
come from mobile platforms. Already the
[ MOBILE ]
iPhone 4 is poised to become the most
popu-lar camera among Flickr users.
Experts say this is just for starters. The powerful blend of
mobile and social capabilities will inspire new products and
services and become the foundation for new ways to work,
shop, and entertain ourselves. The key element propelling
this transformation? Context.
Most of the time when you use your phone, you're immersed
in a specific context: There's the location, the day and time,
what you're doing there, what is nearby, whether you've been
there before. There's also your social graph-the connections
among individuals, as well as among individuals and objects-
with bits of data that are relevant to that context (whether, say,
any friends have shared information about that location). The
future of mobile computing will be all about how big companies and start-ups alike develop technologies-data -analytics
and machine learning algorithms, for example-capable of
42

NA * IEEE SPECTRUM * JUNE 2011

making sense of context data to provide better search results, advertising,
and other services.
To see where this is going, consider
one piece of context information that
companies are already exploring: geolocation. Facebook launched a service
called Places, and Google has Latitude;
location start-ups include Foursquare
and Gowalla. Using GPS and Wi-Fi
data from people's phones, these services offer location-specific information
and deals. If you're at a store, you might
receive a discount coupon; if you're at
a bar, you'll see what friends have said
about the place and whether any of
them are nearby. So what our mobile
devices are doing is linking the digital
world to the real world-and as a result,
new applications will become possible
and people will become ever more connected to other people.
"You're going to see the same kind of
changes to industry and business that
you saw when the Web became popular," says Dennis Woodside, a Google
vice president, "but it's going to happen much faster."

When we talk
about mobile
as a disruptive
technology, we
need to talk about
social. Google is
winning the Web,
but Facebook is
winning social. I
see Google really
flailing around
social. They are
trying to figure
it out, but they
are coming late
to the game.

-GINA TRAPANI
Developer, ThinkUp,
smarterware.org

Mobile phones
mean that people
want information
in context. So
Google's challenge
is to give people
personalized
recommendations
on the fly, which
is different from
a list of search
results. Facebook is
well placed in this
regard, because
they have the social
context for search
on mobile phones.

-RICHARD
MacMANUS
Blogger, ReadWriteWeb,
readwriteweb.com

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

TOP: GINA TRAPANI;
BOTTOM: SCOTT BEALE/LAUGHING SQUID

The Mobile Web
Will Be a Smarter Web

http://www.smarterware.org http://www.readwriteweb.com http://SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2011