iPhone, a hub for mobile social media?
I was thinking a little bit about the iPhone. And then I was thinking a little bit about AppleTV. And then I was thinking a little bit about Google. And then I had a few more thoughts. So, Google’s already integrated into the iPhone, map style. We’ve seen that in the demos and the commercial. And Google’s going to be integrated with AppleTV - bringing YouTube to your screen. It doesn’t seem like a big leap of faith to believe that YouTube is coming to your iPhone as well. Obviously, it could happen via the web browser, but I suspect that isn’t the most compelling experience, a full screen youtube would be much cooler. I’m sure this is something that could be built very simply.
YouTube is already doing more in their flash player, I’ve seen pre and post roll ads (which you can thankfully skip over right now) and I’ve also seen a related video browser (kinda flickr style) at the bottom of some embed windows when you mouse over the video. This is a great self sufficient interface - they’re going to be able to monetize as well as promote new videos off the website (something difficult in general to do) - this could be improved upon in an iPhone style app, as well. Google and Apple are growing tighter and I take it as a sign of great intelligence that Apple is one of very few large companies that does not reflexively see Google as a competitor and devote all efforts to attacking Google in whatever peripheral business they could be considered competition.
With that in mind, it isn’t hard to see how a lot of the social media sites like Flickr and Facebook could and would want a mobile component that the iPhone in all it’s large screen and hipster cred glory could readily take advantage of. It seems that the target audience (especially the initial target audience) of the iPhone and users of social networking are probably pretty identical and with Apple giving hints that it’s platform will be more open than was initially thought - I think this could easily be a reality. I guarantee that Apple wants some kind of special YouTube and Facebook applications on the iPhone, it’ll be a huge driver of adoption.
June 29th!
