antoniocapo: Blog Post: A twittering life. http://tinyurl.com/33esrk. Yours similar?
You can never be too fast to follow the latest trends in the World. Being slow, on the other hand, is unacceptable; it means you're not cool! Last night I was sitting around, doing some work, then @antoniocapo sent this out on Twitter, and the post got me thinking... (It also got me thinking that I'm probably the only one amongst the 8,000 people at RIM that uses Twitter. Facebook is catching up :)).
Well, for those of you who don't know, I work at Research in Motion, RIM for short. We make the BlackBerry. We are THE innovators in mobile technology. To be more specific, I work in the group that makes your Gmail, Yahoo!, heck all your personal emails delivered to your phone so you get more addicted to your device (more info here). We are the kings of push mail technology which saves you gazillions of dollars on mobile data bills.
So, what has this tweet got to do anything with what I do? It got me to realize that we're still very much on the corporate side. RIM's not trying hard enough to tap into the consumer market. Yes, last couple years we've done a lot to tap into the consumer market and achieved great success (ever heard of Pearl, Curve ?). But we can do better, we should be doing much better.
Then what happened next? We said, let's tap into social networks. I bet only people that had Blackberry's heard about the infamous (!) Facebook app. In my opinion this brought the biggest shame on the company's profile but nobody has realized it yet. First of all it's no where as cool as the Facebook iPhone app - it's not even close, it hurts. Let me tell you what this app does. You know, Facebook sends you emails on certain things - like somebody sent you a message, wrote on your wall, added you as a friend, right? All this app does, is sees these emails on your inbox and displays them to you in a pretty application. You can reply to the wall posts, etc from this app but that's about it. You can also tag the pictures you took with you BlackBerry and upload to Facebook, but that's the cool part of the app - so unimportant. Why don't I like this app? Because it relies on Facebook sending you an email (I'm already pissed off at Facebook because it never delivers these emails in a timely fashion anyways).
If you ask me, any application on BlackBerry that doesn't use push data somehow is LAME. A Twitter app that refreshes every 15 minutes is LAME (The coolest thing so far - which is kind of accidental, is to have Twitter send notifications to your Google Talk on your BlackBerry; but still, that's not a true, native Twitter application). A Facebook app that doesn't send you all the notifications is LAME. We provide really good infrastructure so you can write apps that will deliver real-time data to the device, i.e. push! Push, push, push, push.
What can I do so I don't cry myself at night? I take it as a personal goal to raise awareness of the BlackBerry API to the masses, a la iPhone SDK. We already have a great network of sources for BlackBerry developers, however - for some reason - it's not as cool, or popular as the iPhone's. Why isn't there any buzz about BlackBerry apps? What saddens me the most is the fact that even thought there is a tremendous amount of BlackBerry apps out there (yes, even US government has in-house apps built on BlackBerry infrastructure) the mass media - aka non BlackBerry users - don't know about them.
All BlackBerry developers out there - make sure you drop me a line. I want to hear your thoughts and ambitions on how to improve your experience so YOU can design and develop the coolest applications.
All BlackBerry users - drop me a line as well. What kind of cool applications do YOU want to see on your device so iPhone and other smart phone users are jealous of your BlackBerry?
PS: I'm no where related to the group that publishes the BlackBerry APIs, nor am I a PR person. I have no influence what so ever on those groups and I don't want to be. This is totally a non-work-related initiative of mine.
