Arrington Post – Leveraging the Network Effect in iPhone Apps

Article from TechCrunch

This Michael Arrington post is a great early critique of one of the areas of improvement for iPhone apps – leveraging the full set of capabilities available.

Although this should be an obvious point, too many folks are still thinking of the iPhone as a phone or a phone with a web brower, rather than a mobile computer.

From a web3.0 perspective, the iPhone presents ample ground to get out of the box…whether it be multiplayer gaming, location-aware applications. But there are more a-has to be had:
- The iPhone has a built in video
- Built in speakers and microphone (and other phones are starting to see/dabble with speech to text apps – PalmCentro)

There are examples of new applications which allow you to use photo capture on a phone to get pricing data and retail locations on a product you’re looking at, or to buy it on line, for example.

So this multiplayer game idea could be extended to include a chess game where you can play with your partner, but also invite observers (or chess coaches…) to watch, where you could relay moves via voice, or where you could support a simultaneous web conference. For that matter you could replicate the chess in the park experience, and have an environment where multiple games could be played at once, with participants talking in real time, playing, and observing.

And if you were all really close to the park – well, you could get a text automatically offering a meet up and live throw down.

Oh, and you could probably all be listening to the same new CD simultaneously, both conferenced and live. Don’t get me started on ordering pizza for your lunch break…