entertainment eclipses community in mobile applications (sad)
I suppose that everyone saw this coming except me. Certainly the investors who bid up JAMDAT to stratospheric highs - while Openwave (at over 10 times their size) remained flat - had their eyes on something...
That something is the big pot of money that mobile operators are raking in from entertainment-related junk (yes, showing my bias early in this post) such as ringtones, game downloads, TV highlights, sex chat and other such nonsense that people are using to fritter away their time and money on while sitting on the bus.
I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if it weren't detracting from a focus on building real community-based mobile apps and enhancing the experience of communicating with your friends and family and co-workers, but no ... the entire industry seems to have shifted itself around to try and appeal to a worldwide audience of 13 year old boys and girls.
Consider as an example the current home screen for Cingular's mobile internet service (provided by InfoSpace, another high-flying beneficiary of this lamentable trend):
-- What's Hot (links to various ringtones, games, junk)
-- Ringtones
-- Games
-- Messaging
-- News
-- Sports
-- ....
and then under Messaging, to add insult to injury, the very first link is for some Jumbuck application (read: sex chat).
This may all be profitable as hell and driving color-screen polyphonic-ring-tone handset upgrades like crazy, but I think it sucks, and it's not building any kind of community and it's not enhancing the basic experience of communicating with other humans.
So, would some far-sighted mobile operator kindly go and buck this trend and nurture some services that actually help me communicate, please?
That something is the big pot of money that mobile operators are raking in from entertainment-related junk (yes, showing my bias early in this post) such as ringtones, game downloads, TV highlights, sex chat and other such nonsense that people are using to fritter away their time and money on while sitting on the bus.
I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if it weren't detracting from a focus on building real community-based mobile apps and enhancing the experience of communicating with your friends and family and co-workers, but no ... the entire industry seems to have shifted itself around to try and appeal to a worldwide audience of 13 year old boys and girls.
Consider as an example the current home screen for Cingular's mobile internet service (provided by InfoSpace, another high-flying beneficiary of this lamentable trend):
-- What's Hot (links to various ringtones, games, junk)
-- Ringtones
-- Games
-- Messaging
-- News
-- Sports
-- ....
and then under Messaging, to add insult to injury, the very first link is for some Jumbuck application (read: sex chat).
This may all be profitable as hell and driving color-screen polyphonic-ring-tone handset upgrades like crazy, but I think it sucks, and it's not building any kind of community and it's not enhancing the basic experience of communicating with other humans.
So, would some far-sighted mobile operator kindly go and buck this trend and nurture some services that actually help me communicate, please?