Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

The Social Software Weblog says Meetro is releasing versions for PSP and Nintendo DS. I like the part where companies are thinking about the new sources of input that mobile technology brings. Computing devices are more and more situated in their environments, which carries additional information that should be factored into software. However I don’t like the software release parts of all of these. Why are all these companies releasing software instead of APIs? When you’ve got a social application, like location based IM is of course, network effects dominate the uptake of your service. So why limit your users to a few platforms you have the resources to port to? Figure out how to make your business work with an API available instead of just software, and let anyone who wants to hook up to your backend. If you take a look at the overall outlines of Google and Yahoo, this seems to be what they’re going for. There shouldn’t be a silo of “online info and services” and then “location based info and services”. One store of information, increasingly including location information for everything. And the location based software just provides a different view and filter than the standard online version, but it should all flow back into the same system. What happens if I meet a great new friend with my location based IM and want to continue the conversation at some other point when I’m sitting at my desktop? Keeping a gulf between normal services and location based services is just adding to the switching cost as well.

Would be great if those big IM providers would open up their APIs for the messaging backend so that location based IM didn’t have to exist as a different system. Sure would be huh?

Spencer mentioned the ICE contact info trend. It’s basically just a grassroots effort to get folks to enter emergency contact info under a common abbreviation in their cell phone contacts list. There’s a full story at USAtoday.com:

A British paramedic came up with the idea of asking cell phone users to input an entry into their cellular phonebook called ICE for “in case of emergency.” Accompanying that acronym would be the name and phone numbers of the person who should be called if something has happened to the owner of the phone.

I love simple ideas that make things better. The campaign has gone well in the UK apparently, and there’s a push to get it going here in the US too. So create an ICE entry yourself and pass the idea along.