ATT Offers a Clue to Where Search is Going
April 23, 2010
If you haven’t read Stephen E Arnold’s “The Seven Forms of Mass Media” post on his Beyond Search site, it would be worth your time. It gives some hint at as to the next big social media hole to fill.
With today’s darlings, Facebook and Twitter, generating an overload of personal data and Google and Bing producing hundreds of thousands of ‘hits’ for most queries, how can search be more relevant to the device we all use most… our smart phone?
This week, AT&T’s first quarter report to Wall Street showed the fewest number of subscribers under contracts in two years. And with the premise that it will loose it’s iPhone exclusivity at some time in the near future, where does it look for the one thing that drives increasing value…growth?
According to AT&T’s finance guy, Rick Lindner, “Wireless for anyone is not going the way it was five or ten years ago. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities to grow in wireless.” Lindner told the Wall Street Journal that “AT&T will look for acquisitions in fields that would support its focus on mobile data.” BINGO!
As Arnold noted, “The challenge that is kicked to the side of the information highway is, “How does one find needed information in this seventh mass media (mobile)?” Says a reader, not very well in my experience. In fact, finding and accessing information is clumsy for textual information.
With all of the mobile companies scrambling for growth in a marketplace that has seen its well of opportunity become more full, the next thing is the big thing. Bet on search… instant and directed search of data that returns desired results in the first few hits.
The one item everyone has in hand at all times is his smart phone… and it is most often, the first used for instant results. But this ‘seventh media’ mandates conciseness and pinpoint information or it becomes the burden instead of the benefactor.
Social media advances have given us the feeling of need because it has shown the gratification of ‘instant.’ With no office or home computer or no time to pause, reflect and refine, instant and concise is the next god. No doubt about it.
Jerry Constantino, April 23, 2010
Post was not sponsored.
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