Social Life, Verizon’s misguided effort to jump into the social media pool
The new social media application called Social Life from my mobile carrier, Verizon Wireless, got me excited. A multiple service client for my phone? I thought “It’s about time!” Then I checked out the application a bit and quickly changed my mind.
Verizon produced what is basically a service like Pigdin, Trillian, Miranda, Adium or Meebo to aggregate multiple social applications to the phone. This is something that is sorely needed, however; Verizon left off some of the most popular social media tools and included some truly random social tools that aren’t really in heavy rotation yet in the same way as some of the ones they excluded are.
MySpace is included, so that takes care of the glitter graphics set and gives a nod to the giant network of MySpace users out there. Missing, however are FaceBook and FriendFeed, two of the fastest rising social network tools around. They were left off in favor of LiveJournal, AsianAve, BlackPlanet, FaithBase, GLEE, , MiGente, Photobucket, Rabble and MTV’s social tool. We won’t even talk about Twitter – I’m assuming to put Twitter on the list would have required giving everyone extra data, text, minutes or something to handle the bandwidth load from the Twitter noise river.
In addition to leaving out some key players in the social media sphere, Verizon’s application is flat out ugly. It’s not quite as ugly as MySpace, but it is about as close as you can get to it on a tiny, tiny phone screen. In this day and age I have come to expect not only function, but form as well. It is no longer ok to dump some ugly application on me with a non-intuitive user interface. I have come to expect more from things like this, a view of the application world which I guess you can thank other social media applications for.
I already have MySpace and FaceBook’s Mobile sites on my phone’s favorites, and I use FriendFeed’s fftgo and am in process of trying (and discarding) several Twitter phone clients (come on Twhirl, make me a .cab phone app). I’m tapped into the sites I use on my mobile, I just got a little overly excited at the thought of having all in one convenient easy to use package – that would have been worth $1.49 a month for me. As it stands? It isn’t worth “free”.
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March 10th, 2009
Is there any way on a verizon phone to get a twitter app (other than by letting twitter pound your phone with texts that is)? Why are verizon apps so soviet style?