Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

For Christmas, employees at Invoke received a welcome gift: Kindles. While some of us were skeptical about this new-fangled contraption, a few weeks of use have made converts of us all… and we aren’t the only ones. Due to the Kindle, Amazon sold more e-books during Christmas than print books.

Apple’s pending iSlate promises to encourage further adoption of tablet PCs — and may even signal a shift away from netbooks. As Apple is one of the few computer manufacturers that has not hopped onto the netbook bandwagon, this may be the product that bridges the gap between the iPhone and the MacBook. We will not speculate on how the iSlate may be a “game changer”, but we do think, based on our experience with the Kindle, that tablets are here to stay.

We can’t help but wonder how tablets could change social media. Whenever a disruptive technology disturbs the media status quo, it also changes how people interact with each other. Here’s how we think tablets could impact social media.

How the Form Complements the Function

There’s a reason the average blog post is less than 500 words: reading text on a monitor is hard on the eyes. While many of us do that for 8 hours a day (and sometimes longer), few find the experience more pleasurable than a book, thanks to glare, flicker, and other maladies of the back-lit screen. Moreover, 16:9 widescreen format has always lent itself better to movies than text. On smartphones, messages must be shorter. An iPhone’s small screen means lots of scrolling for big blocks of text.

Tablets hit the sweet spot for reading. They are small enough to make for easy scanning, yet large enough for making scrolling (or “page-turning”) a snap. Most of them use a technology called “e-ink” to make reading easier, and take away notorious flicker that plagues back-lit monitors.

In addition to the publishing sector, education will be the first industry profoundly affected by tablets. Tablets will cut students’ costs and dramatically reduce their physical load. And one can only begin to imagine the impact on libraries, which will move increasingly online. These examples just scratch the surface. Who knows how tablets could affect hospitals, law offices, or any profession that requires massive consumption of text?

Where does social media fit in?

The tablet form factor is an obvious boon for long-form content. It would therefore find an appreciative userbase among professionals who use many documents. However, since most tablets will be equipped with wireless Internet, there’s no reason users should remain passive readers.

Imagine students being able to send study notes to each others’ kindles, and then be able to provide further insight. Picture chefs not only perusing recipes, but adding their own critiques: “This one’s good, but too much salt.” Because tablets complement text so well, this may strengthen online dialogue — and may even improve well known social sites like Wikipedia that are already text-heavy.

Finally, if the Kindle is indicative of a broad trend, future tablets will probably implement an iPhone-style app store. What this means is that developers will inevitably build social media apps that complement a tablet’s function. Just as apps like Foursquare are built specifically for mobile phones, so this will be the case for tablets. Want to organize a virtual book club? It could be just a social media app away.

Update: Apple has announced their tablet today — and controversially have called it the iPad. As expected, major publishers have signed on. And it is confirmed the iPad uses the same app store as the iPhone.

Tags: apple, content, kindle, social media, tablet

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 10:42 am and is filed under Press Releases, Tech, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.