The Social Mobile Long Tail explained

What follows is a short extract from the recent “Soul of the New Machine” human rights/technology conference hosted by UC Berkeley, in which I explain my theory of the Social Mobile Long Tail.

This video is also available on the FrontlineSMS Community pages

Social Mobile Long Tail

A full video of the session – PDA’s and Phones for Data Collection – which includes presentations from InSTEDD, Ushahidi, DataDyne and Salesforce.com, is available via the FORA.tv website.

105 thoughts on “The Social Mobile Long Tail explained

  1. Patricia says:

    I’ve read about your thoughts on the long tail before, but it’s all much clearer when you hear it from the horses mouth. 🙂 I think you’re so right about there being a lack of tools. I just wonder what we need to do to shift the focus?

  2. Tobias Eigen says:

    Thanks for posting this to your blog as well, Ken – this is an important message that we all need to get hammered into our brains, so I appreciate the reminder and the sharing.

    The long tail you describe can also be applied to email and the web.. where often too much energy and money is being spent on the stuff that requires lots of bandwidth, wide screens and fancy computers. I’ll try to keep this in mind as we relaunch the Kabissa site this summer, hopefully very accessible and tailored for low bandwidth and low tech users in Africa.

    If it doesn’t please hassle me so we fix it. 😉

    Cheers,

    Tobias

  3. kiwanja says:

    Thanks for the re-tweets, everyone.

    @Patricia – I’m not sure whether you work in this space or not, but one of the key challenges for developers is gaining an understanding of the landscape where their tools will be used. I see so many which revolve around a need for internet access, or high-end phones, and these just don’t work for many NGOs in the long tail.

    I’ve written a couple of blog posts about some of the challenges, and perceptions, in building tools for these kinds of organisations. You can read those here:

    http://www.kiwanja.net/2009/02/social-mobile-myths-and-misconceptions/
    http://www.kiwanja.net/2008/11/mobile-applications-development-observations/

  4. kiwanja says:

    @Tobias – You’re quite right. The concepts can easily be applied to other technologies such as the web, email and so on. I guess the difference here is that there’s more awareness in those areas of a need to provide low-bandwidth versions and technologies, and there are common platforms in the form of browsers, email clients and so on. In mobile there is less awareness (I believe), and we have a fragmented and complex hardware environment to deal with

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