Apple hosted their worldwide developer conference (WWDC) this past week, and the highlight was Steve Jobs’ keynote speech, where the Apple CEO introduced the next version of the iPhone. The key points were all aimed at bolstering the iPhone’s functionality and consumer-friendliness, rather than changing the mobile game, which the first iPhone clearly did. There were no real features announced that haven’t already been released in other phones, but that should not discount their importance: Adding functionality to an already stunning phone is major news.


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Andy Baio is a programmer/journalist living and working in Portland, Oregon. He's the creator and co-founder of Upcoming.org, the social events calendar acquired by Yahoo!, which he recently left to develop new projects independently. Original reporting on his personal weblog Waxy.org has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, Wired, Boston Globe and MSNBC, among others. He's received legal threats from EMI, Disney, and Bill Cosby -- and framed each one.

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Just as it was trendy six months ago for every media site to develop a social network, it’s now becoming just as trendy to say that they shouldn’t develop a social network. We are also getting references to things like “Facebook fatigue” and the general idea that consumers have only so much time and attention. As a result, it is not uncommon to hear Interactive media executives state that it is pointless to add another social network when consumers simply will ignore it. This is a significant mistake and one that misses major big picture trends like the increasing openness of existing closed garden social nets and, most importantly, the strategic importance of interactivity.

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Google’s mobile phone application platform, Android, will launch later this year, and it was showcased for the first time last week at the Google I/O conference. While there are a lot of questions remaining to be answered (not the least of which is how many carriers wills support the platform by selling the phones), my overall initial impression was incredibly positive, and the press stating that the Google phone could be an “iPhone killer” may not be far off the mark.

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Last week I pointed out that a significant opportunity for local and traditional media is in leveraging the power of interactivity. For a site like Facebook or MySpace, the interactivity itself is a key value proposition, but this is not the case for practically every local media site today. Ask almost any newspaper, television, or radio website manager in markets across the country what the greatest value of their sites are and interactivity would be very low on the list. You’ll hear things like “local news,” “station information,” “promotions and contests,” and a whole host of other things ahead of interactivity or community. All of those things are important, but they far undervalue the incredible power of interactivity, and this lack of prioritization is one of the reasons Facebook and MySpace are as big as they are.

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One of the little known but important things about the Internet is that niche sites earn much higher advertising rates than mass-appeal sites. This is one of the reasons that social networking sites are struggling to grow revenue and Yahoo’s stock price is depressed despite its truly amazing suite of content sites. The real question is how narrow is too narrow? These are the kinds of things being worked out on the Internet as we speak.

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