S60 Open to new features

There has been a lot of discussion about user generated content in both the web and the mobile already for a couple of years. Websites like Flickr, YouTube and MySpace have become extremely popular: Flickr has over 2.5 million members (half of the population in Finland!) and YouTube gets over 40 million video views everyday [2]. Whoa, that really is a lot!

People love telling about themselves, their lives, interests and they are also keen on browsing through material other people have created. This need is a really powerful one, as it can be seen on the success of above mentioned services and others like them. In addition to the web services, there are also lots of mobile applications and companies satisfying this need: Mobile Entertainment magazine lists altogether 57 of them in its latest number [2]!

Some of the listed mobile services support the existing hits and others are creating user networks on their own. For example MySpace has a mobile extension (that works only in the States) and in Nokia’s newest N-Series phones (N73 and N93) there is an in-built feature that allows easy picture transfer to Flickr.

I think that the easiest and the most successful way of creating a success story with a mobile application that uses user generated content is to link it with an existing application like Nokia has done with Flickr. The users can initialize the application on their computers (registration, layout, feeding in the basic information etc.) and after that they can push information to the service with their mobile phone whenever they feel like it. This is what I call a win-win situation from the user’s and the business’ point of view, or what do you think?

With this post I’d like to also thank you all who have been reading our S60 User Experience blog. I’m heading off for summer holiday on Friday and after the summer there will be partly a new gang contributing to this blog as I’m taking up on new challenges! However, my mobile journey will continue in one way or another - can’t imagine life without at least some kind of mobility in it. For you I wish the best possible experiences from here ‘til eternity!

[1] The title of this post refers to the post “Death to User Generated Content” by Derek Powazek
[2] The article “Community Action” that this post refers to was published in Mobile Entertainment magazine 06/2006, issue 16.