Forrester on social/lifestyle apps:

He believes that the current crop of trendy social businesses like the location-based, check-in social network, Foursquare, are “nonsense” — and they will eventually be swept away in a new “post-social era”. This is because these services require more time of users… time that users cannot give.

Colony says that people in the Western world are “using social” more than they are volunteering, praying, using the phone, emailing and exercising. In fact we are using social just a little bit less than shopping and childcare.

“We believe social is running out of hours. We’ve reached the limit of hours that people can give to social,” he says.

 

I agree, as I mentioned earlier, that we do not have space nor time to check-in to 3 – 4 different apps. I still struggle with seeing Facebook take this one. Mobile is about simplicity and ease of use. I’d argue Facebook is not good in either.

In the past few weeks I have been playing around with a number of interesting new mobile apps on my iPhone. I have started calling them “Lifestyle apps” for a number of reasons. First of all they are primarily mobile and as such I have them always with me – ready to be used when I whip up my iPhone. Second, they have a very basic and simple use  case – they collect information about how, were and with whom I spend my time. Third, they are inherently social – I can share the above mentioned information with my friends, family and anyone else who cares. They may have different approaches to how they do this but one way or another they know more about my lifestyle than anyone else. So what are they?

OINK
This is a little new app from a company called Milk, started by entrepreneur and investor Kevin Rose. The main idea of Oink is to allow you to rate anything, anywhere. You go around places and Oink stuff. Slowly you build up credibility in certain areas (I am going after hamburgers and coffee) and with the amount of Oinks growing, your opinion matters more and more in rankings of products, services, etc… I guess what the creators are trying to build is a universal ranking system for any experience by mining the user generated Oinks (sounds dirty). The app is beautiful and rather easy to use. There is not much content in it yet (in Europe) so I wouldn’t go there looking for recommendations just yet. But the experience is great and I think they are on to something.

Path
If there was a contest for the most beautiful app on the iPhone (now that I think about it, there probably is) I’d vote for Path. The user experience and design on the new 2.0 version of Path for iPhone are amazing. The core job of Path is to track your life via different types of content you share with the app. At any point in time you can open the app and take a picture, share your location, say who you are with, just write a note and other things. This content is placed on a simple timeline with date and time tags that track you better than the FBI. The idea attracts me because it is much more personal in a sense that you are collecting this information for yourself as a kind of journal. You could in theory go to the app in 20 years and track where you have been and scroll through your encounters and experiences. I don’t see any rankings, recommendations or algorithms that would hint at a business model for the company which actually makes me feel better about the app.

Foursquare
I guess most people have heard of Foursquare by now. If not, know just that it is the first successful location based app that won the contest for THE check-in app against Gowalla (acquired last week by Facebook). This app takes a different approach to your lifestyle than the others – it is about gamefication. You check-in at different locations, score points for various things (100th hamburger joint in 100 days,…), leave tips about them and share with friends. The point I guess is to be the go to place for location. What attracts most people is who leads in the rankings of most check-ins and points, which to be honest is not that big with me. I do check the app for interesting tips when I am traveling though.

Instagram
The last of the apps I will mention may seem more of a photography app than lifestyle. But don’t be fooled – Instagram is one of the most popular iPhone apps because it combines a classy design, artsy feel and easy to use user interface. Taking a picture with it and making it look great is very easy and many people use it as a consequence. But most people don’t realize that an important part of Instagram is the fact that you share your location (if you want) when taking a picture and that you are sharing it on Facebook, Twitter and others. As such Instagram has a trail of where you have been and what did you experience in the form of a beautiful stream of pictures shared on social networks.

So why did I just spend a lot of your time with a simple description of these apps?

Once you start using them you will realize that there isn’t space for 4 of them and trust me there are a lot more of them on the App Store. I felt ridiculous at dinner today, checking in with 4 of them, taking pictures with each and writing different statuses. And I don’t think people want to take a picture, write some text and share their location with each service in the same way. They want a specific simple experience of tracking their lifestyle and sharing it with friends. So I think we will experience a boom of these lifestyle apps in the near term after which there will be consolidation in the market and we will have a few winners and a lot of losers (Gowalla was maybe the first to go, though being acquired by Facebook isn’t bad I guess).  What I do find interesting is the different approaches the four I mentioned have to tackling the same problem. Will the less complex single use case apps like Instagram beat the more sophisticated ones like Path or Oink?

What do you think? Do you track your life in an app?

One more thing: I found really surprising is that I did not use Facebook to check-in, take a picture or write a status update. For me Facebook is not a mobile app. It is too cluttered, crude, generic and confusing. Maybe it is just me but I don’t use it to create content, I just feed it from the other apps. Should that worry Mark Zuckerberg? Maybe, maybe not – he always said Facebook is a platform for sharing and connecting.

I love reading good quality news and reports online. I haven't bought a newspaper in a long time and even on the Vlerick campus – where the Herald Tribune, Wall St. Journal and the Financial Times are available for free – I rarely touched them. On the other hand I pay for FT.com and read it religiously. For a long time newspapers did not get how people consume content online. But that is changing quickly. 2 cases in point:

1. The New York Times – Skimmer version – http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/ - for the Desktop

This app is perfect for skimming through the news quickly. The basic view has a very clear and perfectly readable layout with high quality text. The user interface is very easy to use and straightforward. I love it.

2. The Financial TImes web app for Mobile http://app.ft.com

The Financial Times decided – in light of the new rules set by Apple for publishers – to use a web app to deliver content to mobile devices. The app is simple to use, syncs all current edition articles for offline viewing and is easy to navigate. A pleasure to use on the iPhone.

So my point? If you are a newspaper you better have a great reading experience online – desktop, tablet and mobile. If you do – I and many others are willing to pay premium.

I am writting this post on my Blackberry Bold via the WordPress app for Blackberry (latest beta build). It’s easy to use, very fast and gets the job done. Not sure how the formatting will work and I got no spell-check but anyway…

…Clicking the publish button…