Yesterday I had a very interesting conversation with a new friend who shared some of his views about the future of mobile personalization. For Gilad, mobile personalization is all about presence and content sharing. You probably ask – what those have to do with personalization… I’ll explain :)
Remember the days, when the mobile was a newborn, batteries had very short life and we had mentality of wired communication? Oh, we used to turn on the mobile to make a call and then turn it off right away… funny. Thanks to technological changes and improvement of battery life (we still complaint, and yet, they’ve improved…), today we carry it everywhere and always available, sometimes switch to ‘silent’ (still available for SMS) but always ‘on’. It’s interesting to follow how it influences our mobile culture, how our grasp of ‘availability’ changed. First we used the mobile only in emergency, then we demanded everyone to be reachable 24-7 (“why didn’t you answer me when I called? Ha?”). Feeling unpleasant when screened and feeling intruded being called on all hours, we realized availability is fluid and has more then 0-1 sub categories.
BUT… tatatata - imagine that you could get the status (available or unavailable) of friends you want to call without initiating any kind of communication (call or send sms), just like we do today on IM? Even better – imagine that we could get the ‘emotional status’ of them: busy, on the phone, driving, on a date, tired, or maybe pissed off (pls call)… whatever they would want to share about themselves. There’s no doubt that end users would benefit from sparing wasted money on unsuccessful calls, for operators, it’s more complex…
All communication relies on personalization: all I need to do is personalize my profile, express my availability and emotional status and choose who can see/ be subscribed to my profile. As my friends/buddies/contacts, you will probably be moved to see my status changes from ‘cool’ to ‘pissed off’ or even from something very ordinary like ‘at work’ changes to ‘back home’ and initiate communication. Next you could subscribe to my list of 5 last downloaded ringtones/realtones/ ringbacks, learn that I’ve changed my wallpaper and see it, see my location, my last moblog rss… the sky is the limit! Sharing this info with friends is far more reaching self-expression, since more people get to see this mobile content. And from operator’s perspective it could be beneficial too - it urges users to get and share mobile content (the best sales agent is your friend).
Last thing to bear in mind – this is self expression in a non-invasive way, because my friends/buddies/contacts need to subscribe in order to view my content, and I can determine the access or restrictions to it. I guess some of you think – “it’s too much of exposure”… hey, look around at today’s teenagers, the MySpace etal generation, this is how they socially communicate… Be prepared. :)
Technorati Tags: Gilad De Vries, mobile, personalization, presence, connectivity, availability
A few days ago 
The Carnival of Mobilists is here again. This week, Ajit Jaokar from 
But there was another thing she didn’t plan… After opening the box and starting to play with her new toy, she saw that it has an Orange icon on the top right corner of the HS. Unwillingly, she was turned into an Orange walking ad. Yay! I’m not talking about the money issue of buying something for your own use and self expression while in return you become an ad - because in other areas of life we’re actually WILLING to pay more for the visibility of the brand name (on cars, clothing, fashion accessories, personal electronic gadgets, etc); While having your Gucci or Nike brand name visible is a totally wanted thing by many people, being a walking ad for Orange (or any other operator for this matter) is not. 
Picture yourself the following situation: you’re IM-ing about some private stuff with your friend. Let’s say you’re crying about a not-so-long-ago break up from your b\g-friend. And there you have ads popping on your dialog screen, preventing you from seeing the last sentences you just wrote. After 10-17 seconds, the ads fly to the side of the text - but stick there. How would you feel about that? -pissed off that’s how! You get ads on the banner (I can live with that), on the message banner, on the contact list, on the welcome screen (they should have a law against that annoying thing), on the extraz page and now instead of your conversation text you’ll get flying ads! Doesn’t that remind you those hideous pop ups before the days of Google AdWords? 
"Klonies Blogging Idol" is still running... Causing the participants to nervously bite their nails not knowing who’s winning since many friends want to get the chance to try the blogging thing. For those of you who haven't heard about it, I'm looking for blogging talents among the Avatars Group, to get them blogging in our upcoming Klonies Blog. So let me introduce you to my fourth guest, Tom Sella, a dear friend of the group, a Klonies addict, a regular reader (I didn’t pay him to do so I swear) and 
How long would it take to bring us, our personal computers, and mobile phones, technology just as recently 
ever utters the word phone.
this whole IM thing is the lack of interoperability between all the different
Who would have believed that my little "Klonies Blogging Idol" would get so much participation! :) For those of you who haven't heard about it, I'm looking for blogging talents among the Avatars Group, to get them blogging in our upcoming Klonies Blog. So let me introduce you to my third guest, Assaf Katan, also known as the man behind the Klonies branded content. Well, enough said... Assaf, the stage is yours!
