The Shift

On my way back from running another 5K this past Sunday (not my idea, honestly, but I’m not sorry I did it), I happened to see a headline in the Merc saying, in essence, that the PC era was over.  This conclusion based on the ridiculously expensive purchase of Motorola Mobility by Google at the same time that HP was shopping their PC division and killing off WebOS (a real shame, as it might have been the most genuinely interesting iPhone challenger out there), along with the fact that Apple has passed Dell, and Microsoft, and…well, every other publicly traded company on Earth in terms of market cap.

I hadn’t really thought about this as a post-PC thing until today, when the developers of NetNewsWire (my indispensable RSS reader until this year) released their new hotness, an iPhone and Android app called Glassboard.  It’s basically another substitute for mass text, albeit slightly different to Beluga or GroupMe: you create a “board” and add people to it, and it becomes a permanent stream for text and photos.  Basically instant personal social network.

And I started to think about it – social networking really is starting to become a mobility phenomenon.  Skype just bought GroupMe, while Facebook acquired Beluga and turned it into Facebook Messenger.  Hipstamatic kicked off the mobile-photo-share space which was promptly exploited by Instagram and Camplus and Path (not to mention more esoteric options like With or Color).  And Twitter was built from day one on the notion that it could piggyback on SMS (thus the 140-char limit).

The thing is: how many of those options don’t require a PC?  Hell, how many of those options aren’t even available on a PC?  Factor in the location-based element to social networking – things like Foursquare or Loopt are basically worthless if you have to rely on a laptop to use them – and you wind up with the inevitable truth: social networking is most effective when it’s always on and always with you, and that means a phone.

Time was, a cross-platform killer app ran on Windows and Macs.  Now, the killer cross-platform app runs on iOS, Android and Blackberry.  The age of the personal computer is still with us, of course – what could be more personal than your phone? – but it’s important not to confuse a personal computer with a mere PC.

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