Enter World: exploring mediated cultures

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Countries where a low percentage of the population use banking systems have been pioneering the use of mobile phones as payment devices with great success. And now similar, though smaller scale, options are beginning to appear in the U.S.

While Afric Xpress, and other similar services throughout Africa, offers seemingly limitless ability to pay bills, shop, send funds to individuals, and more ... The emerging option here is still centered on having a bank account. Exciting no less…

PayPal opening its platform up to developers is a big step in this development. Twitpay, formerly powered by Amazon Payments, has moved to using PayPal Adaptive Payments. Twitpay lets you buy or sell items through the simplicity of text messaging. At the Twitpay site you can text funds directly to someone, but at RT2buy the options expand from personal payments to include delivering content, promotions, and fund raising.

What does this mean?

It means small-scale transactions are now more mobile ... no pun intended, though it’s fitting.

Selling something on Etsy, but have a large following on Twitter? Sell directly on Twitter too, skipping that required step of moving to another site.

The beauty of Twitter has always been its malleability of form. While you may be sitting at your computer updating your status, I can be out and about with my mobile phone and still receive your messages, respond to them, forward them ... and now buy the media content you’ve posted, the tickets to your event, or support your cause. All from my phone. Or vice versa, it can happen in any combination. Maybe while I’m out I find a great wave of inspiration to promote Obscurae tickets and run a special on them using Twitter—I can post that with my mobile and you can respond from the web, an application, or your mobile.

It’s a great computer-optional social connection that now allows for commerce connections within the social network and beyond. 

Friday, July 10, 2009

A back-and-forth legal case surrounding social networking access between Power.com and Faebook covered in Mashable (Power.com Sues Facebook: Data Ownership War Breaks Out) introduced me to Power.com as a new option for accessing social networks.

It’s curious that the Power.com logo still has a Facebook petal (or fan blade?) even though it is notably missing from the login options.

Could be a sign that they are hopeful to regain access, useful to their case, or just an oversight.

All that aside, it seems like Power.com is yet another improvement in applications to network the networks. From one page you can read messages, updates, profiles, and look at albums plus access all of your contacts from across social networks.

They’ve also added chat and a radio. I’m a huge fan of online radio. When I’m working is about the only time I sit and listen for an extended time and being exposed to Pandora‘s selection has introduced me to some great musicians over the years. I also love being able to listen to KXLL in Juneau for all their great shows. It’s an alluring concept to integrate an international radio show with a social network hub. It could lead to longer time spent logged into the network hub on top of providing background music while catching up on social news.

The main limitation I see in Power.com right now is the concentration on specific big name sites. You can only integrate Twitter, LinkedIn, Orkut, MySpace, Hi5, Flogão and VoteMe. Of these options I have two accounts and regularly use one, so there isn’t much incentive to consolidate at this point. While it’s understandable that integrating each network requires coding (that can apparently cause lawsuits), my ideal social aggregator would function more like NetNewsWire does for information feeds.