SnapDragon Consultants

[This is the second post in our continuing series looking back at 2008, which started with "Was 2008 The Year of Micro-messaging?". This does not complete our year-end retrospective. the third part (and possibly fourth, fifth...) will just have to come in 2009.

Last time we left off with "For example: if 2008 or 2009 turns out to be the year of micro-messaging, which is also sometimes called micro-blogging, what's happening to regular old blogging?"...]

A few days ago, Tommy from the micro-blogging service Publr commented on a old post about new Gmail features.

Some micro-blogging services do seem to focus more heavily on design than others, but I believe it’s possible to both remain neutral and aesthetic. I could see some interesting “character-enhancing” features for bloggers. I would actually be interested in seeing a visualization of where posts originate from, maybe even a meter that averages how original a user’s content is and how many times it’s been reblogged, etc.

What he’s describing does sound pretty interesting. A content-oriented mapping of the blogosphere could be tremendously useful for understanding the structure of particular communities and the way conversations or pieces of content move through that structure. It might also provide small, individual, socially “local” bloggers with a useful scoreboard when competing with others over the success of their contributions.

It’s hard to really do something like this with the existing blogosphere for reasons I’ll get to in a moment. This was the role that Technorati was supposed to play but it didn’t quite work out. It’s a bit easier to do within a defined community of bloggers all using the same service. The Web is still untamed. There are lots of ways to produce and distribute content and not everyone does it in the same way or in the same place. Making everyone talk to each other is more of a technical question. Trackbacks and data portability projects are examples of effort on this front.

But technology alone probably won’t get us to the goal of a really well organized online conversation. There are also human factors to consider, both social and material (or practical). Micro-blogging (possibly a misleading term) is, in some respects, a way to confront some of these social and material barriers that stand in the way of the evolution of blogging (or blogging-like activities). At the same time it’s also something of a return to blogging’s original “roots.”

Tommy was responding to a point about differentiation in a crowded Web 2.0 niche. My example was Gmail’s addition of “lifestyle features” like Mail Goggles (that require you to answer math problems before allowing you to send email late at night during the weekend) and Canned Responses (which are basically form letters for people who find themselves repeating the same message often). I argued that this aspect of Gmail’s strategy was worth trying to emulate.

There are many, many redundant Web 2.0 services and applications. For example does the world need tumblr, Posterous, Publr, Soup and Streem—all of which recently came on the scene offering exactly the same micro-blogging functions? Maybe not. But maybe one or more will differentiate themselves by including the sort of character-enhancing features that Gmail has. After all, establishing an identity based on an aesthetic designed to appeal to a particular user identity can only go so far if it doesn’t change the nature of the product. Many Web 2.0 sites try to convey an attitude, but this is usually a superficial proposition—Gmail is doing something more.

Well, it turns out that I have to significantly revise my position on this. It seems that all five of the services that I listed have been pretty busy since I had last looked at them; all of them now have have features that to some extent set them apart from the others in addition to their own particular style. 2008 has definitely seen these service grow and evolve. There’s a lot to say about the life-streaming or status update style of micro-messaging that we focused on last time (and in the many posts we’ve done about Twitter), especially because they can seem so novel. The micro-blogging aspect of micro-messaging (this terminology will be refined as we move forward with our retrospective) is often more familiar because blogging is so well established. But micro-blogging also might be more important because it might indicate major changes in such a well-established aspect of the Social Web.

So let’s take a look. We’ll start with Publr because it features good illustrations of what I mean by overcoming both social and material barriers.

Publr is a very simple, very basic service—at least so far. Like most of the other services, it provides the user with a very simple dashboard from which to create a variety of different kinds of posts: text (like a “traditional” blog post, photo, video, audio, link (such that the post title link takes you to an external page rather than than a single-post page), chat (which automatically formats text to look like a instant message conversation using colons and line-breaks) and quote (explicitly for text from elsewhere that one wants to share). There are no “read more” links, the entirety of every post displays always. There are no comments and there is limited profile information.

At least there are themes to choose from so you can customize your Publr, though currently only two. However, there is also full access to the CSS and HTML code that determines everything about how the page looks and is organized. That means Publrs are almost infinitely customizable. Even widgets (of a sort) can be inserted directly here. For example, if one really wants comments one can search for the code someone posted somewhere (people do that) and just cut-and-paste it in.

All of this is fairly typical of micro-blogging. It’s a trimmed down, lighter, less serious version of blogging (when and how blogging got “serious” in a subsequent post in this series). Another important typical feature is “following” other users so that their posts appear in your dashboard when you log in—no need to go check all those individual sites or bother with a messy or unfamiliar RSS reader. Their development blog confirms that following functionality is on its way though.

So that’s what makes Publr a micro-blogging service, but what distinguishes it from the many others out there? Two things seem to stand out: integration with the Ping.fm API and with the Firefox Ubiquity plug-in.

• According to their own site, “Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.” But this doesn’t just include what have traditionally been called social networks. It includes micro-blogging services, micro-messaging (status update or life-streaming) services, social bookmarking services, photo sharing services, major blogging platforms….in short, all of the most popular social technologies. This is useful because it allows people who primarily rely on different services or tools to all see what you’re doing or what content you’re generating.

  But Publr is also enabled to automatically post to Ping.fm (and thus all your other services) in addition to displaying posts from Ping.fm. You can just us Publr and have your posts (or links to them in the cases of micro-messaging or social bookmarking) appear all over the Web. That’s enormously powerful because it allows you to communicate to your friends no matter what services they tend to use.

• We posted about the Ubiquity plug-in for Firefox last month. It allows you to use typed commands at any time to do things that would normally require navigating to other websites. These aren’t just keyboard shortcuts, you can perform searches, take notes on webpages…all sorts of things. We wrote that:
  

  That might sound trivial, but it’s a big time and effort saver for anyone who blogs a great deal or otherwise composes for the social Web . It might only impact early adopters, but it could mean that they are each willing and able to post a little bit more content and little bit faster.

  There would be a wider bandwidth connection from brain to blog post. That’s a factor (if a small one) in what shape the blogosphere takes in the future, and that matters to a lot of people for a lot of reasons. It’s not just the heavily funded, headline-making new Web applications that determine the direction the social Web will take. There are a whole lot of little things that subtly influence that evolution, and that’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to predict where it will go.

  There’s a Ubiquity command written for Publr that you can add to your browser from their site. It allows you to just invoke the Ubiquity tool (hit ALT-U, or whatever you set it as, and a little floating gray window to type in appears), type “publr” and then whatever you want to say to the world, hit enter and it immediately posts on your Publr page (you must be logged in at the time from your Firefox browser, of course).

The Ping.fm integration is a way of dealing with the social factors that limit the evolution of the Social Web and the blogosphere in particular. Communities can remain in communication despite fragmentation across many, many different services. No one has to choose between one friend using one tool and another friend using a different one. When I post to my Publr the whole world can hear me. That’s always true to the extent that someone can visit my Publr page on the Web, but anyone with more that a handful of actively content generating friends doesn’t have the time for individual visits.

The Ubiquity integration deals with material barriers: it reduces the energy necessary to make yourself heard. If I can post a thought to my Publr without opening a new browser window, by doing nothing more than typing “ALT-U; publr; my though; enter”, then I’m a lot more likely to post any given thing because the threshold for doing so is lower.

Now think of these two things together. Once I take the tie to set it all up (create accounts on all the significant networks, connect the with my Ping.fm account, install Ubiquity, etc) I can almost effortlessly express myself at all the places on the Web I might ever want to all at the same time. That’s a remarkable thing and it has the power to totally reshape the way online conversations work; it could radically change how the visualization Tommy mentioned looks.

But there are four more micro-blogging services to talk about, each with their own interesting aspects and potential implications for the evolution of the Social Web. Not to mention what all this means for normal blogs (macro-blogs?).

[So if you're interesting in where this whole "social media" thing might be headed be sure to check back for part three!]

It’s the end of December and that means it’s time for annual retrospectives. One of our favorite examples of this tradition is the annual Year-End Google Zeitgeist. These are always fun the browse through, though the older ones are a bit more interesting to go back over (want to recapture the cultural moment of 2001?).

The method isn’t exactly scientific, but it’s appropriate given the choice of name. Like the Google Trends tool, Google Zeitgeist relies on search volume for a particular term in order to determine its significance. It’s not as silly a metric as it sounds. “What are people Googling?” is a question worth asking.

But an even better question might be “what are they Googling more?” The answer for 2008 is, well, a lot thing actually. But not least among them, Twitter:

That’s a pretty sharp increase in interest, but there’s hard numbers too. O’Reilly media is reporting that “Twitter’s user base grew more than 500 percent from October 2007 to October 2008.”

But hold on a moment. ReadWriteWeb, citing a new report from the Marketing firm HubSpot, notes that:

Twitter has 4 to 5 million users, 30% of which are “brand new or unengaged.” They estimate that Twitter sees between five and ten thousand new accounts opened each day. That’s a nice number, but it’s far below, for example, Facebook’s astonishing 600k daily registrations and 140 million active users. Twitter is a fascinating little phenomenon - Facebook is mainstream.

Why is this important for users? Because most of the people you might really enjoy connecting with on Twitter are unlikely to ever use it. They are busy using Facebook instead.

It’s important to keep perspective. Facebook is 30 times larger than Twitter and still growing at a phenomenal rate. It adds about as many users in a week as Twitter has in total.

So how can 2008 be the year of micro-messaging if the activity’s most visible example remains relatively tiny? Well, there’s a reason the post started out with a discussion of Google Zeitgeist: Twitter might still not have the numbers that Facebook does, but it sure has got a lot of people’s attention. We’ve certainly posted about it a great deal and it seems that there’s nothing technology blogs want to talk about more.

And it’s not just the Web 2.0-watcher set. “Traditional” media companies seem to be hopping on the Twitter bandwagon as quickly as they can. “Grader“, HubSpot’s tool that ranks the “power and reach” of Twitter users, inlcudes The TImes, CNN, the BBC, and Anderson Cooper in the top 100.

Twitter didn’t become the most important thing on the Web in 2008, but sometimes it feels like it did. Twitter didn’t overtake Facebook in terms of users (or even come anywhere close), but 70% of current Twitter users joined in 2008.

But then again, that doesn’t really matter, does it? Even if RWW is right and people aren’t using Twitter because they’re happily busy with Facebook, keep in mind that the big story about Facebook in 2008 was their controversial redesign that focused the site more on its “newsfeed.” Not Twitter, but still micro-messaging. Between the fact that alpha-geeks have loved Twitter for a while now, the tech blogs can’t resist posting about it and the largest communities on the web are adopting micro-messaging style features…

Maybe the real question is whether 2009 will be the Year of Micro-messaging. But it’s not 2009 yet and there’s still more of 2008 to reflect on, which we’ll be doing between now and the end of the year.

For example: if 2008 or 2009 turns out to be the year of micro-messaging, which is also sometimes called micro-blogging, what’s happening to regular old blogging?

This past Saturday, I was in a Duane Reade on lower Broadway right before closing time. While I was shopping, a guy ran out the front door of the store with a bag of unpaid for merchandise.  The two women who worked there looked at each other and shrugged sympathetically. One said, “Oh well” and went back to what she was doing at her register. The other said, “We’ll never catch him.”   It’s like it was business as usual. No big deal. No one got upset. No one criticized the guy. No one called the police.

By sheer volume, the iPhone gets a lot more chatter than phones using Google’s Android mobile platform (and at this point, that’s really just the the G1). Proof can be found here. Does this mean that the Android/G1 marketing effort has been a failure? That Apple so dominates the discussion of next generation mobile personal computing devices (because it’s tough to call things in this category “phones” anymore, even “smart” ones) that the competition can barely even get a word in?

Maybe, but that doesn’t seem to be the whole story. Take a look at this large outdoor ad for the G1:

Curious indeed. Who exactly is this ad targeting? The red “M” superimposed on an envelope shape in the little yellow box (just under the YouTube logo) might be a clue. That’s the Gmail icon. Gmail is an important and popular Google service but not nearly as present in the public consciousness as YouTube, for instance. How broadly recognized is that little symbol? How many of the people who see this ad register that it’s there to remind them that a Google phone would have better integration with the Google mail application? We’ve written before about how Gmail seems to cater to a younger, more tech-savvy set generally. That seems like the same sort of demographic that might be likely to buy something because they’re curious about it or to even be curious about something like the G1.

The iPhone never tried to leverage obscurity in order to generate interest or buzz. In fact, Apple made pretty sure that the iPhone never really was obscure. People were only curious about it during the lead up to its release. After that, there was plenty of talk about it even outside of the in-the-know techy crowd. There were network news stories about people lining up to buy the thing. Nothing like that has happened with the G1. The Android platform has floated below the radar of broad awareness and seems almost insignificant compared to the titanic iPhone. There are iPhone ads on TV demonstrating its capabilities. Consumers have to actively seek out information about the Google alternative.

But maybe Google is most interested in exactly those consumers who do such seeking. For the iPhone to appear on the scene the way it did it had to come out in its finished form; it had to basically be perfect. The G1 isn’t under that pressure, nor should it be. The iPhone platform is exclusively for the iPhone hardware (as is the case with all Apple products) but the Android platform is intended to run on many phones built by many companies. The G1, built by HTC, is simply the first. It turns out not to be perfect and there have been several complaints. But because the Android platfrom is much more open than the iPhone one, the response to people who complain can be “well, improve on it then.”

Clearly this isn’t a response most consumers want to hear, but some do. There’s also an intermediate bunch that might not be able or willing to start reprogramming the device but can appreciate the idea of it. It seems like that’s the group the ad above is targeting: Tech-aware, probably often younger consumers who understand that this is still sort of in beta (keep in mind that Gmail has been that way for around half a decade a now) and are willing and maybe even eager to be one of the brave first few to deal with the rocky start of the new platform.

So yes, curiosity makes it stronger because while the launch of the G1 might have been relatively quite compared to the dramatic unveiling of the iPhone, it has a narrow but powerful appeal to the segment of the population for whom being there for something new is worth having an imperfect product. That same sort of person might have been first in line to buy an iPhone the summer before last, but it’s old news now. It’s also worth noting that the gPhone and iPhone aren’t just competing for users, but for developers. Both need people to be writing applications for their platforms and it’s this early adopter type of user who is likely to be able to do that.

All this raises an interesting question about the idea of “early-adopters”: Do they lead the pack because they figure out where things are headed before others get there or because others follow them to their destination? The need for developers to make each platform more attractive is an interesting factor in favor of the second thought in this particular case, but there’s the broader issue of whether “alpha-geeks” (as Tim O’Reilly calls them) are trend-anticipators or trend-setters generally speaking. They’re often assumed to be former but Google seems to think that they also might be the latter. After all, these aren’t just mobile application developers, they’re tech bloggers and twitter-ers and just generally likely to influence others in terms of their understanding of this market.

The G1 is still new on the scene and the Android story will get a lot more interesting as more phones come out and it starts appealing to a broader category of consumers. But how that plays out (especially in comparison to the iPhone) might have a lot to do with this early, less visible stage.

Interesting development from Discover: Biodegradable credit cards.

Probably a good differentiator, particularly in these tough economic yet increasingly eco-conscious times.

Discover has always been something of a credit card wallflower.  This approach might give it some nice street cred and bounce.

From Nina Lentina at MediaPost:

Discover Financial Services says it is the only U.S. biodegradable consumer credit card currently available in the marketplace.

The card is made of biodegradable PVC, a substance that allows 99% of the plastic to be safely absorbed when exposed to landfill conditions. The plastic will begin to break down in soil, water, compost or wherever microorganisms are present, and will fully degrade within five years. The biodegradable card can be identified by the biodegradable symbol that will be visible on its back.

We’ve posted a fair amount about mobile technology in a range of contexts. There’s a reason for this: personal mobile devices are an active and dynamic frontier for social and information technology. There’s a reason for that too: these devices have opened up to realms of human activity to technological innovation. It’s only until recently that someone could ask themselves “what type of mini Web application might someone need while they are waiting at a bus stop?” or “how can we make our tool is the one people use to figure out what to do when they discover the movie is sold out?” Google’s recently released voice-based search application for the iPhone is a good example.

O’Reilly Radar has two recent posts specifically about the iPhone and the applications for it. They note that it’s been 5 months since apps for the iPhone have become available and that there are now 10,000 of them. That’s a lot. It’s enough to start drawing conclusions about the market by looking the information Radar offers about their breakdwon:

Games are the leading category, accounting for one in four of total applications. This reinforces Apple’s recent marketing campaign around games.

$0.99 is the most common price point, although one in four applications are free.

The most expensive application currently for sale is iRa by Lextech Labs for $899.99. This is video surveillance application that integrates with a number of CCTV systems.

The entire iPhone App Store catalog could be purchased for just over $30,000, although there’s only room to fit 129 of them on your iPhone or iPod touch at any given time (148 apps in total, but that includes the default applications from Apple).

Some helpful graphs let us go a bit deeper on those first two points:

Not only are games the most common category and $0.99 the most common price, the overall population of applications is skewing that way further as time goes on. Meanwhile, the proportion of free apps is decreasing.

There’s something really interesting here: people are selling software for a dollar a shot. Users of mobile application platforms are willing to spend a dollar to play one of a couple thousand games as many times as they like. How many of them are waiting at bus stops? How many of them are people who would otherwise be playing a game on a dedicated gaming device like a PSP and how many would otherwise not be playing games at all? Could games be leveraged as a way to build critical mass for mobile social applications?

But to come back down to earth, money is changing hands here. That means the developers of these games have found a viable value proposition on this new, mobile computing platform. Lots of other people are worried about doing that, asking how advertising will work on phones for example. Maybe there’s room for ads embedded within games. It’s only been five months so it’s probably too early to say anything for sure, except that a lot of people are going to be watching to see what happens next and a lot more who probably should be.

Typalyzer is a tool that’s gotten bandied about the blogosphere recently, and not surprisingly. Given the URL of any blog, it will analyze it and then offer a classification—a sort of psychological work-up—of that blog’s author(s). Here’s what it had to say about the writers of our blog:

INTJ - The Scientists

The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it—often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be pshysically hesitant to try new things.

The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communcating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use conrete examples. Since they are extremly good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone.

We like to think that some of that’s pretty accurate. The categories the tool uses are drawn from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which isn’t exactly considered a credible or rigorous method these days, but can still be a bit of fun (as in this case). That’s what the letters in our classification are from, they stand for “Introversion, iNtuition, Thinking, Judging.” When it’s put that way, it might be a little less flattering. However it’s nice to be called special, and members of this group are supposedly among the rarest (there are 16 groups in total), making up less than 1% of the population. In addition to “the scientist,” INTJs are also sometimes called “the free-thinker” or “the strategist,” characterizations we consider potentially a bit more appropriate.

On a bit more serious of a note, the company ultimately behind this tool is doing some pretty interesting work 1) on social media as well as 2) in social media:

1. This project is the creation of a Swedish company called PRfekt. They claim to offer “psychographic blog analysis” and describe their clients as:

   PR Professionals identify key bloggers, measure and track attitude and follow trends and issues in buzz in the blogosphere

   Planners and Strategic Marketers with campaign development and campaign tracking

   Site owners track how their content is spread among bloggers, thus identifying and creating psychological insight about what motivates and triggers different audiences

   Turns out that what they do actually has a lot in common with what we do. It’s interesting to see programming work being done in the social media space that’s not really targeted at consumers so much as practitioners. Aside from SEO and Web analytics tools, there’s not a lot that falls into that category.

2. So their technical work is work on social media (if blogs are a social medium, then “blog analysis” is analysis of an example of social media) but that’s not the same as doing social media.

   However, the way they’ve gotten themselves out there certainly is. We’re posting about them and so are a lot of other people. That’s because they packaged their technology in a fashion likely to disseminate across the Web. No one should be surprised that bloggers like playing with tools that tell them things about their own blogs, they (we?) can be a rather self-indulgent bunch. And if it appeals to bloggers, it’s likely to get blogged about…

   PRfekt is the company all the way at the back, technological end of all this. Between them and the blogosphere that’s playing with their technology is uClassify, a free, creative commons licensed site that lets users use an API to design their own text analysis frameworks. The site provides Typalyzer as a fun example, as well as Genderanalyzer, a similar tool that attempts to determine the gender of a blog’s author. This one might be the even bigger social media success story: it got picked up by BoingBoing, which drove so much traffic to Genderanalyzer that the server failed. That’s some solid free publicity.

There’s even more going on here: uClassify is working on a prototype version of its technology for determining if a blog is in fact a splog (”splog” are short for “spam blog”—an artificially created blog used to inflate search rankings of other sites) and not the original work of a real blogger. That work and their API that allows users to generate their own text analysis tools are both pretty interesting. Maybe we’ll find the time to try our hand at our own custom text analyzer and report on the results.

But all that aside, Typalyzer and Genderanalyzer have managed to get a fair amount of attention by appealing to people who use social media (bloggers) with something that does something fun with social media (their blogs). After all, if you have a blog, aren’t you going to go try one of them now? And if you have a blog, why wouldn’t you go ahead and blog about it…

We’ve just announced that we’re looking for a high school or college student to be a part-time, paid intern and assist with a range of social media and web design projects. We are hoping to find someone with fairly strong HTML and CSS coding skills as well as a good sense of design who can put together some Websites. These particular projects are going to make heavy use of the Joomla! and WordPress open source software, so experience designing templates for those two would be a big plus for any applicant.

Send us a résumé and cover letter if you’re interested. Here’s the full listing:

We are looking for a talented and highly capable high school or college student to be a part-time, paid intern working on social media and website construction projects. These include creating and promoting blogs, e-commerce sites, online directories and other sites.

Necessary skills for social media projects include decent writing ability and comfort interacting with services like digg, del.icio.us, technorati, etc (and possibly their users). The greater a candidate’s familiarity with social media optimization and search engine optimization tools the better.

Necessary skills for Website design include proficiency in HTML and CSS, some graphic design capability and an understanding of basic Website maintenance. Qualified candidates should be able—for example—to manage a WordPress-based site (including accessing and updating it through FTP), create or effectively modify WordPress themes for that site and create basic graphics for that theme. An ideal candidate would have similar ability with Joomla.

Exceptional writing and researching skills are significant qualifications for this position and will also be considered.

Email us with a cover letter and résumé.

Ellen Byron at The Wall Street Journal this morning reports that P&G and Google are swapping employees to promote understanding and innovation.

A couple of fast thoughts: Promoting this kind of “corporate semester abroad” is a great idea and so interesting for an organization that has been compared to the military.   (The WSJ article notes employees are sometimes called “Proctoids.”)

It should be remembered that P&G has track record around bringing outside talent and ideas “in.”  

This new program clearly an outgrowth of something that has been germinating for a while.

P&G, for example, is the driving force behind InnoCentive, for example. It’s the first online platform that lets companies like Eli Lilly, Procter & Gamble, and Dow AgroSciences, which collectively spend billions of dollars on R&D, post scientific problems confidentially and ask the scientific community to tackle them.

InnoCentive taps into its network of more than 120,000 scientists, retired scientists, and students in more than 175 countries. Individuals who deliver solutions that best meet 

Innocentive’s challenge requirements receive financial awards ranging up to $1,000,000. P&G has also opened their research doors to thinkers, inventors, designers, and others around the world to tap their expertise. P&G’s goal is to source no less than  50 percent of all new products from outside the corporation. The strategy is called Connect + Develop and it’s transforming the way P&G handles research and development—and simultaneously shifting the way P&G is perceived by the public at large. Some of Connect + Develop’s better known product development success stories include Bounce, SpinBrush, Oil of Olay, and Swiffer. 

For all this “product” innovation, P&G brands clearly still have a lot to learn.  Don’t we all.

The WSJ article points out that Google employees were shocked when a Pampers promotion didn’t include the all powerful mommy blogging community.  Then again, P&G was surprised to learn that a Google employee didn’t understand the importance of the color orange to Tide’s brand.

Pretty big news yesterday out of the Googleplex:

The new Google Mobile App for iPhone makes it possible for you to do a Google web search using only your voice. Just hold the phone to your ear, wait for the beep, and say what you’re looking for. That’s it. Just talk. Once the App is on, you don’t have to push any buttons to search. Check out the video below to watch engineer Mike LeBeau explain how this works.

After you speak your query, Google Mobile App will return search results formatted for your iPhone.

And if you’re doing a local search, there’s no need to specify where you are because Google Mobile App now has Search with My Location. Search for “movie showtimes” or “Mediterranean restaurant” and you’ll automatically see results based on your current location. For this to work, Location Services must be enabled on your iPhone and you have to opt-in to let Google Mobile App use your location.

There’s nothing really all that surprising about this. All the technology involved—voice recognition, location awareness, google search, advanced mobile Web—is fairly well established, albeit not universally adopted.

The important thing here is that this is a technology people will use, and not just alpha geeks. This is a useful tool that will make life on the ground easier for people trying to do everyday activities that have nothing in particular to do with technology like watching a movie or going to a restaurant.

Voice recognition and location awareness and everything else that technology watchers enthuse about become a lot more important when they start popping up as practical solutions to real problems. When looking back at the coming of the iPhone and other mobile devices with sophisticated application platforms (Google’s own Android, Nokia’s Symbian) in a few years, it might turn out that they were a turning point because they introduced so much technology into everyday activities.

They’ve done a lot to bring new technology out of the bubble and into the practical world. They’ve made that technology a real factor in how people live, work and behave.