Mobile interaction models

The interaction model for the desktop internet was pretty much settled 15 years ago. It turned out that the answer was a web browser. Stand-alone apps such as Pointcast were a mostly blind alley, and while apps persisted for email and IM, and for very specific things like music, the words ‘web’ and ‘internet’ became effectively synonymous to anyone non-technical. Over time we added Ajax and better search and better social, but everything really happened inside the browser.

In mobile this is quite different: nothing is settled. We have the web and apps and of course app stores, and then we have many complications - voice, in-app payments, web apps, hybrid apps, widgets, push notifications, social messaging apps, Google Now and Siri. Then there’s the hardware layer - images, barcodes, NFC, bluetooth, location, motion sensors etc. Innovative and disruptive new interaction models can very often find a route to market, far more easily than they could on the desktop internet. Sometimes, they scale to a hundred million users in a year to two. And we have more and more waves of innovation coming, with things like local wireless from Apple and deep linking to within apps from Android, and a very fast-evolving social messaging space, and more things in 2014 and beyond.

So, we can actually have a pretty limited idea of what the dominant interaction models will be in 5 years. 

(There is a dream, of course, that all these nasty choices and options will go away and we can go back to the nice, simple, limited web, but that doesn’t seem very likely just yet.) 

One of the big changes here is the removal of monopolies. If the web is not the only interaction model then web search loses power as a discovery and acquisition channel. And in parallel Facebook’s desktop monopoly on social has not transferred to mobile and it seemly unlikely that it ever will (I wrote about the reasons for this here). So both of the key channels on the desktop are smaller and less crucial, and also work significantly differently, and are pretty poor at driving some key types of engagement, now that you’re not just looking for a click on a link. This changes lots of things, and creates lots of new opportunities.  

The puzzle for Google is how it brings its vast, decade-old machine learning project to bear on this new complexity of data and behaviour. The obvious problem is that data and behaviour within apps are effectively dark matter that it can’t track (hence the deep-linking initiative in Android). But this is balanced by much richer data collection. Your Android phone feeds it with data all the time - where you are, what you look at, where you go after you search and what you did the day before. The challenge is finding the right ways to collate and present that data - Google Now is one example but probably not the only one. The search box and the page of results is just one possible interface to that machine-learning project - what does Google look like after the search box?

Social faces a different set of challenges. It seems to me that on mobile Facebook will never have the near monopoly that it briefly enjoyed on the desktop - smartphones remove most of the frictional barriers that keep you on one social network. But mobile social more broadly is a vast opportunity. With web search no longer the dominant channel, social, on a far more social device than the PC, has an open door to push at. Tencent announced that the first 5 games that it launched with Wechat integration, starting in August, have had 576m registered users. Mobile social is an engagement, interaction and distribution channel, and it appears to be much richer, and probably much bigger, than social was on the desktop. 

If this is the end to near-monopolies in acquisition and discovery, it’s also interesting to think about it as the end to monocultures. If the interaction model shifts away from web search, that change makes different models and different types of behaviour possible. In turn, one might ask - what models and companies and behaviours were precluded by Google on the web? What good ideas didn’t work because of the way Google did search and the way Facebook did social? How did that monoculture shape things, and how does that change now?