I don’t know about you, but I am not surrounded by friends walking around toting GPS-enabled smartphones on the same social networks looking to hook up for coffee or sushi. And I certainly I do not go out to dinner with a dozen friends who pay the same check with the same mobile app from the same bank. Who lives like that?
I have been a longtime believer in Social – Local – Mobile — SoLoMo — and have experienced it on rare occasion, but no critical mass of adopters have made it part of my world. I suppose it might catch on someday, but I’ve had too many techie dreams dashed by lack of adoption by anyone I knew. Do you remember having a Palm device with IR that could beam contact info to people you met? Did you ever actually do it? Did you ever have a Sidekick that could send contact info over Bluetooth? Did you ever find anyone who could actually use it? The few times I tried it, it took me longer to teach my contact how to do it than if I had tattooed their number on the back of my hand in my own blood.
After I got a G1 four years ago, I tried Google Latitude and got three, count ’em, three contacts to sign up. Two of them lived out-of-state. Then there was Bump and now there’s Beam, but who uses it? I have a Galaxy Nexus, and I don’t even know anyone to Beam with. I guess that’s what I get for not having friends who wear black rimmed glasses and hang out in the Android store. So you see, I have been trying to go SoLoMo for over a decade now; my world just hasn’t embraced it.
Now there are all these SoLoMo startups with cute ads featuring people keeping in touch with their social-local-mobile apps — people living in a world where people actually spend time on anything but Facebook. My question is: Who are these people? Where are they? Are you one of them? Please, tell this Earthling what it’s like.
Related articles
- Beware of mobile’s unintended consequences (zdnet.com)
- Facebook adds ‘Find Friends Nearby’ feature (vodafone.com.au)
- Smartphones hardly used for calls (telegraph.co.uk)
Daniel Greene 
Comments welcome