The big human fundamental needs and capacities on which the growth of the mobile industry was built are social. Social interaction has arguably been the driving force of adoption of both the Internet and mobile communications. Starting with voice call with the widest reach to SMS text messaging, e-mail, instant messaging, down to tens of millions of people reading and writing weblogs and sharing of photos with a close group. How many of these have been explicitly designed by anyone? The ones that have succeeded have been simple open ended functionalities (e.g. SMS is 160 characters of text), based on the primitives of social interaction that leave room for human interpretation and invention. Consider the big human fundamental of gift giving. Has the universal human practice of gift-giving face-to-face really gone digital yet? Could it? Should it?
The challenge has to do with the next wave of the social: What are some of the forms of social interaction existing (online and off) that could slip onto the mobile platform? What are some of the patterns of sharing that could be better designed? What could these social primitives be?
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