Don't give up control - Native Integration Woes

One of the regular questions we are asked is: don't we get similar integration thought the platform?  If so, why should we use you?​

It's a good question.  But it's missing one of the fundamental issues.​  Are the users of your apps your customers or Apple or Google customers?  If the answer is that they're yours, and that you need to know what they're doing and with which social networks and where then you need to be more careful with how you interact with them.  Viafo's gateway gives you several advantages over the native SDK integration.

1. No more SDKs - using our approach allows code re-use across different platforms, 
2. Manage social networks remotely - through our Service Discovery API you don't have to worry about a change to a social network, or a regional variation every meaning you have to re-write your main application again
3. Full Analytics - ​detailed use stats for everything social inside your app, giving you breakdowns by platform, geography, social network and more
4. Branded Sharing - using the gateway means that you can trace back shares to your company or app - rather than to a phone OS

Remember that social networking between your customers using your apps is one of th most important things you can have.​

API Monitor goes alpha

​We've been working on making a piece of our technology available to everybody and today we're ready to go live with the early Alpha of our API Monitoring product.​

​Current oAuth status for major web services

One of the challenges we've faced is knowing when the 3rd party services we support breaks or changes in such a way that it would break our product, or a client's application.  We also wanted to know what latency levels the different social networks operate at.  As we didn't find what we were looking for, we went off and built it.  ​

Currently, we're showing you the averages for the last week.  But if you're interested in having more access and the ability to look at the performance of other APIs, then drop us a line at info@viafo.com to register your interest.​

The current version is monitoring a number of common web APIs, Social Networks and some carrier APIs.  Over the next few weeks we'll be adding more, and will be shortly launching a premium version.​

​Take a look at http://viatests.appspot.com.

South African Perspective on Social Networking Growth

An interesting article here on the growth of Social Networking in South Africa.  While this article is focused on Facebook and Instagram,  the section that interested me was this:

Blackberry and Nokia are still the most popular brands in South Africa, accounting for around 87 percent of the smartphones in the country. Blackberry holds the majority of that with around 46 percent of South African using a Blackberry. Nokia's share of the local market is around 41 percent.

iPhone is way in last place with 3%.  It's often forgotten that the entire global market isn't just the iPhone, and nor is it Facebook and Twitter.  Viafo's strength is to free developers, brands, carriers and agencies from having to focus on 2 platforms and only 2 social networks.

Welcome Google Plus AND yet more reasons why you should be using Viafo...

I will admit to being slightly taken aback by how quickly I've seen Google+ go from something that arrived in my inbox, to something that I'm using more than Facebook and where I already have a non-trivial part of my social graph on already.

And this highlights I think, the need for our gateway.  Here's a new social network, it's rapidly growing, but it's by no means a sure thing that it's going to be a success.  So, what a sane mobile or similar developer would do would be to wait.  Of course, by waiting you might miss out on a new service or a new feature or a new way of interacting with your users.  So should you really wait?

Then again, if you're on iPhone there's a built in wait for you anyway.  You're not going to have Google Plus integrated instantly.

Whereas, with our gateway, the moment that we get access to the Google Plus API then you'd have access through the same set of APIs you're using to talk to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and LinkedIn - now, doesn't that make sense?

We're looking forward to welcoming Google Plus into the fold.

What is ROI for a Mobile App?

I was on a panel on monetizing mobile  at CTIA last week and somebody asked the following question:

"How do I justify the ROI on my mobile spend?"

This is actually something we've come across quite a few times now.  Mobile application spends are currently much lower than they need to be.  At the same panel Christian Lindholm of Fjord complained that companies were routinely trying to get apps built on a shoestring when a comparable design project should have a budget of at least $250,000.  The reason for the difference was put starkly by the CEO of Newser last year when he remarked that they hadn't see the return that justified building a mobile app in the first place.

My response at the panel, and my response now, is that this is exactly the wrong way to be looking at mobile, and this is exactly the wrong time to be trying to work out these numbers.

My first point is simple: mobile apps are here, but they're new.  Asking what your ROI on your mobile app is going to be is rather like asking what the ROI would be on your website in 1998/99 - the fact it you don't know.  But if you don't have something, you've a hole in your marketing strategy.

My second point is more complex and really at the heart of this issue.  People aren't sure what mobile can be yet, but we are getting a really good idea about what it shouldn't be.

Mobile apps are not mobile web sites, and they're certainly not web sites circa 1999 when it was, even then, barely, acceptable to stick some brochure-ware up and call it a site.  In our brand app survey which we're working on at the moment, we're seeing some of the largest brands in the world, ones who have stunning TV, Print and Web campaigns building the most embarrassing apps possible.

The mobile device is unique in how personal it is as a means of accessing data and information.  The web browser, described the other day by Sencha's Developer Guru, James Pearce, as our generation's "Box Radio", is an impersonal "window" onto information.  For most people their phone, especially their Smartphone is an extension of their personality - they have the things they want right where they want them.  They also have access to their friends, their social networks, location information and a host of other things too. 

Consider watching TV.  While the rise of the DVR is impacting how we watch TV, the nature of Twitter is going to save scheduled TV for years to come.  Twitter is the water cooler of the modern age, except you don't have to wait until the next day to discuss what Flynn did on Glee, when you're already following the stream, interacting with  new friends and following new people on the #glee twitter feed. 

The marketing possibilities for the TV companies then become enormous.  That feed and that conversation should be part of your app experience; eyeballs on that feed, should be a part of your app, and the traffic from that app should be fed directly back to you either to come up with new ways to watch - i.e. delivering the best and most interesting of the feeds onto the show in real time, or by creating a social feed later for fans to watch again and follow the conversation they may have missed.

The ROI isn't about the app itself, it's about the opportunity cost of having those eyeballs and fans interacting with your show, brand, organization OUTSIDE of the app experience itself.

Anything else is a wasted opportunity.