Social networks, sharing and your personal information

The latest wave of social media frenzy is about sharing your location and knowing where your friends are, or have just been.
This is something that I have discussed and presented on many times before. In fact in 2003 I presented proof of concept applications on the Microsoft smartphone platform ( then it was actually called Microsoft Smartphone) and the Microsoft Tablet PC platform. These applications enabled the user to post their current location to a blog or shared feed. I have used a number of variations of this to keep my 'Where was Dr. Neil' page updated.

In the last couple of years the rise in popularity of Facebook and Twitter have lead to an increase of related location sharing services. Services like foursquare or Facebook's own checkin system enable you to share your location with the world. This is great for those occasions where you want everyone to know where you are. These systems are mostly an all or nothing solution, either share with everyone or no one. So when you just want to let a couple of people know where you are located it's is back to the old text message or even resorting to call them.
It is for this reason we built Locus. Locus enables you share your location when you chose and with whoever you chose, including Facebook and Twitter.

I truly believe the pendulum will start to swing the other way now, with private personal information becoming more valuable. This value will start to be realized by the consumer and leveraged by the consumer to their own advantage.

When will you start to take more care of the information you share and who you share it with?

Perception is everything

Mix10 was a great event. There was plenty of activity around the new announcements, Windows Phone 7 Series, IE9, Microsoft Translator, Silverlight 4 and Blend 4.

It is interesting to watch how the masses now say it is all about Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 series and nothing else matters. Again and again I hear how touch is the new interface for everything. This perception is clearly not correct and yet it is the perception of developers coming away from an event like Mix.

There were also some missing players from the conversation. One of them close to my heart was Microsoft Surface. I think when a Microsoft Product Group with high profile decides not to attend a big Microsoft event such as Mix it sends the wrong message to the developers and the geek community. Engadget recently published this article, which almost predicts the end of Surface as a product.

This is clearly not the truth. I have been busy training partners over the last 15 months, and these partners are busy building solutions for real customers buying Surface units.

New products like Surface take a long time to roll out. This is not helped by the fact that most Surface applications are still failing to meet the basic criteria of what it takes to be a great Surface application. A very quick litmus test to determine if an application is a good Surface application can be achieved by deciding if the application does anything that cannot be done on a vertical touch screen. If an application would work just as well on a vertical touch screen then it does nothing to take advantage of running on a Surface unit and is therefore not a great Surface software citizen.

If developers and designers can evolve their thinking to understand what makes a great Surface application, I expect Surface solutions to get better and more companies to want to buy them. Until then it will be a long slow process before Surface proliferates into the world.