In my third panel, Untethering the Social Network or What Happens to Social Networks in the Untethered Wilds?, moderated by Joi Ito. Howard Rheingold, Mimi Ito, Scott Fisher, Danah Boyd are joining Joi.
Howard is giving a history of communications from the phone to IRC to SMS right now.
The big take away for the panel is that you can't hack mobile phones. The carriers don't let you do anything with their systems, unlike PCs which are open. Ironically, mobile phones are more social then PCs. So, the more social device is closed, and the less social device (the PC) is open.
Another take away is that blogging is similar to sharing pictures on phones in that the sharing is occurring, for the most part, between a couple of people (as opposed to hundreds, thousands, etc.)
1. so, the software can't be hacked but the social aspect of the phone, the way in which the user employs the phone can be hacked. I don't think that flash mobs and moblogging were described in phone feature sets but there they are....
Posted at 5:46AM on Dec 19th 2005 by mark oehlert