Twitter: the Beta …
Posted in Inspiration, Latest, Thoughts - November 3, 2009 - tim
It’s only been a little over 10 years, but web retrospectives still have the potential to make one feel old when they re-introduce projects you worked on with phrases like:
“Think back to the early days of the World Wide Web, just after the invention of the Netscape browser …”.
But it’s true. In an article on adage.com Kevin Maney recalls the Miller Beer Pager (created by Red Sky back in the mid-90’s – ancient history) and suggests that those early web “apps” were – like today’s early mobile apps – just the appetizers.
And I agree. It was painful pushing the envelope early on. The Miller Beer Pager was frankly a project that probably should not have seen the light of day if you considered the risk involved in creating – back then – what was basically a branded, peer-to-peer IM platform, with humor.
Maney compares the Beer Pager to a “vertical” version of Twitter, which is still – I think – a good idea.
“Then came the Miller Beer Pager. It was a forerunner of Twitter, if Twitter focused solely on herding groups of friends to the nearest happy hour. The Beer Pager was a downloadable widget created by the Miller Lite people. If all your friends also downloaded a Beer Pager, you could use the thing to post a message about where everyone should meet to get toasted.”
The ease with which pretty much anyone can envision, create and deploy a mobile app – thanks in no small part to Apple and the Xcode/iTunes dev deploy environment – has resulted in an amazing array of original (un-sponsored) apps. Sure there’s a lot of talk in the dev community about how to integrate ad-supported extensions, but for the most part mobile apps are independent from advertising.
I hope, as Maney suggests, that “early” sponsored apps like the Beer Pager are premonitions of apps to come in mobile – but I hope they’re smart. The Miller Beer Pager got a lot of attention, and awards, as much as anything for the fact that it was a clear extension of the Miller brand – it made sense. It was cool. It was different. It was risky. Yeah, yeah. But in the end it made Miller Time’s.
I mean damn. That was the point.
So while I’m a big fan of the “brought to you by” concept, the up-and-coming mobile app pioneers of today need to be real careful here. You can’t just slap a logo on anything – you have to have an idea that is, as Nike pounded into our heads year over year, authentic.
Good article. Optimistic.
“… so if you think mobile apps are the bee’s knees already, that’s cool. But keep in mind that this is mobility’s Miller Beer Pager moment — and a mere hint at what’s to come.”
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