12 May The Rise of Mobile & Social Media: A Good Thing? (pt 1/2)
With the advent of the social web and the advancement of mobile technology, the world of work has changed beyond recognition over the last few years. Sit on a train and you’ll be surrounded by people eagerly tapping into their iPhone; take a break in a meeting and watch everyone dive into their pockets to pull out the ubiquitous Blackberry. Business is now done on the move, with spare moments between desk time and meetings filled with emails and tweeting. Mobile devices and social media are the great enablers of our time, making us more efficient and productive, better at multitasking, and more vibrant, enriched and engaged with our lives. Or are they?
Split across two blog posts, I’m going to take a look at the positives and the negatives of the all-conquering mobile device, each (I hope) from a slightly different angle than normal. This post concentrates on how smartphones and the social web benefit my life on a daily basis, and in my next post I’ll look at the drawbacks. So on with the show…
I’m not a PC. At least when it comes to my mobile I’m not. But neither am I a ‘MacMan’ or a ‘BB Boy’. The words iPhone and Blackberry are swear words to me. No, I’m a Google convert; an Android user. My Android-enabled HTC Hero is my lifeline to the world and since I moved into the smartphone world I haven’t looked back. It allows me to keep on top of my work when I’m out of the office between meetings, it allows me to keep on top of the 50 or so blogs that I follow at the touch of its shiny screen, and it allows me to maintain contact with my business network through Twitter and LinkedIn. It really is invaluable to me in my professional life and without it I feel lost. And it starts when I wake up, as last Thursday proves…
Every morning, my smartphone wakes me. I don’t have an alarm clock, and I don’t need one with the Kaloer Clock app. Reliable and fantastically customisable, Kaloer Clock allows me to decide how I wake up, from the colour and font of the bright screen (there are six skins to choose from) to notifications of whether I have messages. It even tells me the weather forecast and speaks the time to me when I touch the screen if I’m feeling particularly dozy. I haven’t missed a meeting yet since installing this app.
When I arrive in London for meeting and jump off the tube, the first thing I do is turn on AugSatNav, a satellite navigation app that works superbly when directing the user around streets to a specific address. Integrated with Google Maps, you can choose map or satellite view and, after punching in the postcode, it ensures I never encounter the ‘run round the streets looking for the venue’ problem that happened more than once pre-smartphone!
At the meeting itself (and after checking in on Foursquare!), Droid Record means that I don’t have to worry about taking down notes – I just set it going and it records conversations, interviews, memos for myself and anything else that a dictaphone used to do. Droid Record also has GPS functionality, enabling me to record when and where the meeting took place and even to alert me at a specified time and/or location.
On the way home on the train, I get a text message from the office reminding me to email a pic I took earlier on my phone, notified to me via SMSPopUp, another simple but very effective, customisable app that means you simply can’t miss an important text message. Looking at the image I realise a bin needs cropping out! No problem though – Photoshop mobile is dead easy to use as a cut down version of the full programme – great for cropping images, adjusting exposure, brightness, saturation, focus and even adding affects.
Job done, Seesmic is my mobile Twitter application of choice. By far the most flexible and robust Twitter app I’ve come across, Seesmic for mobile enables me to keep track of multiple Twitter accounts in an easy-to-use format, interrogate searches, user profiles and lists, shorten URLs for web addresses and pictures and, basically, use Twitter as I want. By the time I’ve got home I’m up-to-date with my Twitter contacts and have read a bunch of interesting articles that I’d never have encountered were it not for mobile technology. I’ve learned stuff.
And that’s just one single day. The social web and smartphone technology enable and, in some respects, shape my working life. I could hardly be more productive, and now use time that would previously have been dead. My mobile guides me and organises me. This has to be beneficial to my life.
Doesn’t it? Read my next post to find out…
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