First Impression Of Nokia Friend View
I'm playing with the Nokia's new service Nokia Friend View as I type this. I downloaded the software on my phone this morning and been using it through out the day.
In short the service wants to be a location aware microbloggin service.
I'm not blown away, nor have I completely lost hope with Nokia. They are trying fairly hard. The service is very Nokia-like in that it's not very user friendly compared to some others that have emerged from the west coast of US. The UI is rather ugly and after you start using it feels that someone has designed it on paper, but never really used it herself as it's not logical all the way through. Similarly the service is still very buggy, not loading the map on the web browser, eating one's battery in no time ...the list goes on and has still some really retarded features like the fact that the nick name is case sensitive. I registered as villevesterinen and now wondering whether there will be another VilleVesterinen. Does not really help you finding your friends from the service if there's two of each name.
I won't go into the nitty gritty, data portability etc. yet as Nokia is still in developing the service and I haven't used it long enough to get down and dirty with the features. Similarly, I won't go into how it could be integrated with Nokia Chat and the Ovi.com service in general for the simple reason that I don't use Ovi.com, since it only replicates other services I use like Flickr and MobileMe. Who knows, maybe Friend View lures me to use all of Nokia's services, but I'm not there yet. Nor is Nokia for that matter.
It's not all downhill though and this, after all, is still an early Beta. I don't know how my Nokia Friend View usage will evolve and where it becomes the most useful. I'd imagine I'd like to use it when I'm traveling and planning to meet people in a city at a given time. It would be very nice to see where their train is coming or see their plane above the Atlantic, but there's still a bit go before that. That said, it would be nice to see when my girlfriend is coming from work and see when she's just behind the corner or if she hasn't left from the office yet. But as many (In Finnish) communicated, they'd like to be able to control the level of privacy between the different contacts. The more of these services advance, the more privacy they invade. Nevertheless, I can find uses for the service already.
The sad part of this new service is that Nokia once had 'the next big thing' right in front of it: Jaiku was build right on Nokia's front porch and is doing much of what Nokia Friend View tries to do without the location bit. Add location to Jaiku and Voilà! One of Jaiku's co-founders and the father of the idea, Jyri Engeström, even worked at Nokia at one time, but of course it was too risky for the mobile phone giant at the time: It could not possibly put its weight behind a venture that is not already ubiquitous like microbloggin services now. That would be risky, which does not go very well with the Finnish management ideology. To make the irony complete Jaiku conversation threads are currently the best places to find out about how the Friend View works (or does not work in many cases), and Jaiku is still better service than Nokia Friend View, Twitter, Plazes and FriendFeed combined.
Now that Nokia has found the new focus for its strategy from the online services arena to go along with the hardware business, it should also embrace the new ways of working. Jaiku went to Google and nothing wrong with that, but if Nokia wants to be an innovative player in the online services field it needs to embrace different kinds of risks compared to ones it has before. This does not deal with mobile phone design, but rather with new behavior in communication as the web evolves. This risk involves betting on smart people, but not in a way Nokia has done before. I'm not talking about hard core MBA heavy hitters that can manage the hell out of any firm, but rather people who are the real pirates of the Internet. I'm talking about entrepreneurs.
Nokia needs to look at how Google has approached this issue by acquiring early stage startups and getting a boat load of smart people along with it. Nokia should start seeing the value in these energetic and smart people who want to change the way we communicate and won't stop until they do.
Similarly, Stefan Constantinescu, who's telling about the service in the YouTube clip made by Nokia, is also one of the best evangelist Nokia could hope for as the guy is super active and vocal in for example Jaiku. Let's hope that Nokia has learned its lesson and sees the value in what Stefan is doing and tunes into the Jaiku channels for community feedback.
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Meeting the team tonight for drinks, will definitely bring up this blog post.
Thanks for the feedback as usual Ville!
It should be noted that Nokia actually acquired Plazes last summer - wonder if this service is based on that platform?
Stefan,
Makes it all worth my time if this is of any help to you guys.
Juha,
Plazes seems to be build on Google Maps whereas Nokia Fried View seems to have been build on a proprietary map what I can tell. So in that sense I don't think it's using the same platform. I could be wrong of course.
And yes, Nokia did acquire Plazes, but that's is not exactly a huge leap of faith given their focus on maps. Secondly Google is killing them in maps whoever they buy in the area. Also, I believe it's the only thing they have acquired if you don't take into account some hard technology patent stuff.
I'd like to see them betting on some new area where they could take a lead globally. Just like they once did with mobile phones.
[...] friends over at ArcticStartup reviewed the software and were left unimpressed: I’m not blown away, nor have I completely lost [...]
[...] friends over at ArcticStartup reviewed the software and were left unimpressed: I’m not blown away, nor have I completely lost [...]
[...] friends over at ArcticStartup reviewed the software and were left unimpressed: I’m not blown away, nor have I completely lost [...]
[...] ????????????ArcticStartup????????????????????????: ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????UI????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Web????????????????????????????????????????…??????????????????????????????????????????????? [...]
Error detected: Change it from *Fried View* to "Friend View" in the first line itself.
Thank you!
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Sampad
Nice but where does Friend View fit in the context of Nokia viNe?
http://www.nseries.com/madebyhand
Sampad,
Thanks for spotting the typo. Now changed as you suggested! Although the typo might describe the service's current state quite accurately ;)
[...] Plazes Acquired By Nokia). Visiblement les premières impressions sont plutôt mitigées ( First Impression Of Nokia Friend View) mais nous pouvons faire confiance à Nokia et à sa force de frappe pour faire rapidement évoluer [...]
[...] service in itself is some sort of port of Jaiku and/or Nokia’s Friend View. Zircle does not provide their own mobile application, but you can use the service through the [...]
I think I have an answer for you about the case sensitivity. I attempted to register (as I always do) with my user name (which is a unique made-up word that nobody else ever uses or would come up with), and again as always I capitalised the first letter, since that's the way I prefer it. FriendFeed converted my username into all lowercase for me. When immediately I tried to change my nick to the capitalised version, FF told me the name was already taken, which is clearly nonsense since that's exactly the same name I initially typed to register. What FF meant is that 'Username' is equal to 'username' and so therefore the name is already taken -- by me! If I attempt to go to 'Username' there is nobody there squatting on my properly written name, it just returns an error. So the upshot is that FF wants everybody to go all lowercase, but the nickname-duplication check is case insensitive.
I don't mind a case sensitive nickname, but I really do object to forced lowercase, that's a different thing because that's just not how I write my name.
[...] in November we wrote a lengthy piece on the new Nokia Friend View. The service was supposed to focus around location based [...]
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