Robert Scoble argues social media is still in its infancy, with mobile and location-based services about to reshape the landscape. He points to check-ins, photo sharing, and augmented reality as the next wave, while warning that always-on connectivity is making it harder to disconnect from social tools.
Robert Scoble, one of Silicon Valley's keenest followers of social media and a man who is keenly followed by many thousands of people on the Internet. Robert, where are we in historical terms in the story of social media? Are we at the beginning? Are we in the middle? Are we towards the end?
I would say we're still toward the beginning. You know, I mean, we probably would have, if we had this conversation in the 1980s, we would have had a BBS and we would have really recognized we were in the beginning. And then the web came along and ICQ, remember ICQ came along in 96. Yossi Vardy, right, Yossi Vardy got famous and rich in 96 because his kids developed this instant messer that got to 100 million users and 18 months or so. And now we have Facebook and Twitter. And I'm sure there's something else coming along. I mean, Instagram is a way for us to talk about photos and it's like, why do we need that? Didn't we have Facebook? Didn't we have Twitter? Didn't we have other, you know, Flickr? But people seem to take to that very quickly. And I still think there's a lot coming, especially because our world is moving toward a mobile phone. And that's a fascinating change in our lives.
So when the full story is written on social media, Facebook and Twitter will appear, you think, relatively early in the first part of the book.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, let's say we're 100 years from now. You know, do they survive a hundred years? Are those hundred year companies? You know, history tells us probably not.
They may not even be hundred day companies in 100 years, right?
Well, they're going to be important companies for a while, but CompuServe seemed like it was going to be really important. In the middle of 1990s, everybody in the world was on CompuServe. And then the web came along and started eating and newsgroups started eating away at that. Remember in the 80s I was on Prodigy. Everybody thought Prodigy was going to be hot.
And so what changes fundamentally? What are the, in 10 or 15 years in terms of social media? What are the fundamental revolutions that haven't even started yet?
I think the one we're in right now is mobile and location. And we still haven't really come out with a good system that lets us express the place we're in. I mean, foursquare, I can check in here and tell you I'm here, but I can't really put any photos up in fact, an app coming out tomorrow lets me do panoramic photography just by swiping my phone. And it's really remarkable. So now I can express where I am in a little bit different way. And we're seeing lots of services, from Yelp to restaurant reviews to food spotting that lets us share meals. To koala that lets us put pictures up about the place. To Foursquare which lets us get deals.
And Facebook place.
Facebook places which lets us share where our friends are. We're still in the early, early days of the mobile and location revolution. And so for the next year, that's probably what's going to preoccupy me.
Well, think beyond the year because we'll talk a little bit later about.
Well, eventually they're going to jack something in your brain, right? And we're going to be able look at you and have your Facebook information coming up above you.
How will that work in terms of location? Will that mean that wherever we are, there's a sort of a moving picture show of where we're at in our relationship?
There could be. I mean, augmented reality apps are already starting to do that. Where I can see that your phone is over in that direction. Right. These phones know gravity. No compass and no relation to each other, you know, because I can see my phone, can see the wifi radio in that phone and can know it's over there and not over there. And so we can build augmented reality apps that are pretty rich today and they're just going to get more crazy tomorrow.
Will we be able to switch them off in the future?
It's getting harder and harder for me and for me to turn that off, you know, I went for a day without it and I was jonesing the whole day long. I felt naked. I felt.
Don't you like feeling naked once in a while?
Once in a while. But it's such an important advice in your life now. It's how you talk to your wife and how you talk to your kids and how you talk to their school teachers and how you talk to yourself.
If you turn it off, you're really. You're saying you're turning yourself off in a big way.
Yeah, it's getting harder to do. It's getting. Remember I remember working at Microsoft and talking to employees who would take vacations to places where there was no cell phone service, no WI fi service, because then they can really escape from it all. And it's getting harder to do that. I mean, even Yellowstone has cell phone service in some parts of the park. So you have to pick part of the park that doesn't have cell phone service, just escape from the electronic world.
