3 Trends in Social Media & Web 3.0 (Part 2)

For those of you who have kids, you probably will be able to associate lots with the never-ending "barrage" of demands of your kids on why is the PC so slow or has no sound (my son cannot wait for the sound driver to load up) or hey dad, have you booked movie tickets to "Percy Jackson and the ..."?  Utterly useless to try reasoning that your kid is too impatient or that you need some time to wind down before proceeding with the tasks at hand.  And so, I see ...

(2) My Life Needs to be Served by a Click (and Quickly)
In a previous 2009 post, I wrote about how kids nowdays multi-tasks more and more.  Kids, youths, innate (or evolved) Digital Natives as they are, live and order their lives with clicks at a PC, with a mobile phone, with a TV remote and so on.  To get to the required information and service, there is hence an increasing focus into the semantic relevancy in search.  You see this in Microsoft's positioning and development of their new search engine, Bing, as a decision engine.
A number of partnerships and integration between Google and Twitter integration with Social Search, Bing Search in Facebook, Bing and Twitter integration in search etc, have also sprouted in the recent months

GPS-enabled mobile phones have recently also introduced and increasingly started the market proliferation of location-based apps, with free maps (with Google Maps, Nokia Ovi Maps), augmented reality (e.g. Point and Find), cloud-based tags (wikipedia information, bookmarks, information of points of interests) and social sharing.  Apps like Wikitude or Yelp showcase this capability.

E-book readers are increasingly also moving into color as well as supporting more multimedia content formats other than ebooks like games, with the recently announced Amazon.com Kindle development to launch its own apps store, and moving beyond ebook contents leading this market trend.

Enterprising developers are also looking to attract consumers with a richer ebook experience with Vooks (refering to Video Books) which comprise of ebook, great videos and further augmented with social comments, and available for both PCs and Mobile devices.

The Zip Cars service in the US is a great example of an end to end "click and mortar" or online-offline hybrid service.  A consumer could find a nearby car to rent, unlock the car with an app and zip off quickly to his appointment venue.

Examples are aplenty.

Next coming (3) Privacy is but a window away.

til later,
Nelson Wee
@nelsonwee


Photo credit: NA.dir / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

More reading reference links:
1. Google flexes Twitter integration with Social Search Lab
2. Google Social Search, and Twitter integration
3. HUGE: Microsoft Inks Deals With Twitter and Facebook to Put Status Updates in Bing
4. Google Social Search, Bing Twitter Integration, Yahoo Site Explorer
5. [Updated 17-FEB] and now MySpace Goes Real Time With Google Search
6. [Updated 17-FEB] Google's Social Search and Discovery