Hello all you fine folks of the bipedal variety. I trust you are well in your daily travels. I bid you greetings from the smoldering husk of a once great nation that is fully in the throes of self immolation casting itself into the fiery ashes of history. Statists and Progressives have tossed aside founding principles and are redesigning the culture into a putrid immorality of decline. Sound economic principles give way to debt and welfare. I now understand what it looked like when Rome burned.
“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” –Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-46 BC)
History has a way of rhyming does it not?
Anyway, I am in the middle of a vast eCommerce project that I have learned to hate. As the economy continues its recessional slide whether the liars in the leviathan want to admit as much or not, I wonder of the intelligence of starting a business when the cusp of collapse is so very close. As I mentioned before, I cannot in good conscience rely on one sole source of income. There must be a backup. A plan “B” of which I am pursuing of the consumer variety. I also continue my flirtation with publishing the written word though I cannot conceive of a topic worthy of asking for a fraction of a person’s daily wage.
Apologies for the above hubris as a preamble for the reason I decided to collect a few words on this page. Allow me to continue in a more focused manner. I noticed on the technology section in the rancid pages of Yahoo News this headline:
App usage has stalled as smartphone users hit burnout
People download a lot of apps, but they abandon 95 percent of them, according to a recent study.
Who didn’t see this coming? How many guberu offers have you tossed aside detailing the Easy! Quick! Simple! way to create an app? The collective affiliates were breathless in parading these software packages to the herd promising app glory. I always wondered what kind of apps someone could push a few buttons and create that would hold any value. And exactly how much time do people have pushing apps around on their 4″ screen anyway? When you get past your typical Facebook, Twitter, email, Tumblr, Instagram and TuneIn, there really isn’t much left that isn’t a novelty. Sure, everyone has that one or two apps that they love that no one else has heard of but seriously most screen tappers stick with the basics.
I personally heavily use about 4 apps and use another 5 sparingly throughout the month. I suspect I am not that different from most people not dependent on parental units for survival.
I think it funny how marketers can absolutely flog a money making opportunity to death. Perhaps we’ll see the same headline in a year or so for ebooks sitting on Amazon’s virtual shelves.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I would like to think that the whole digital book craze will slow down a bit, but I don’t think it will go away and I definitely don’t think ebook sales won’t be worth the endeavor…books have always sold since the beginning of time (or whatever), and with all the mobile devices around I don’t see anything getting in the way of ebooks…
@Eric – I rather think you’re right. Though the ease of publishing an ebook will most likely ensure a collection of crap available for purchase. It will take an effort to find something worthwhile to read.
Ebook discovery is no more an intractable problem than discovery of worthwhile websites and blogs. And, Amazon will act as a partial gatekeeper to keep out the truly spamola and dupe content stuff.
As it has been for a long time, discovery will be word of mouth, and virtual word of mouth via Amazon’s “here’s stuff you haven’t bought yet that other people who buy the kind of stuff you buy have also bought” algorithm…
That’s def true…especially right now. Which is why if you (or anyone reading this) is thinking of publishing some ebooks, they MUST be high quality – high quality = better reviews = more sales = amazon likes you = your books will sell for a long period of time.
I found it humorous that I found this post on my few-days-old smartphone. It’s my first smartphone.
As a late-comer to the app scene, I was a bit taken back at the inordinate large amount of totally useless apps that are available. I tried a few that looked promising, then quickly deleted them as the bored me quickly and what seem interesting, turned out to be useless. Out of all of them, the only one that I’ve found useful is one that helping me quit smoking. That would pay for the phone over and over if I’m successful with it.
There are probably a few that I don’t know about yet that would be useful tools. I expect to come up with 4 or 5 like you stated here. The stunning apps that I don’t consider true “apps” are merely extensions of Google’s offerings. For example, I found your post on the Google Reader App while being entertained in the same way that Reader’s Digest was used in the days of old.
There probably is a way to make money with cell phones, but from my perspective, it will either be in the same traditional blog methods that we already know about, with something that is truly a useful tool, or a combination of the two. The app market is so flooded with useless toys that it’s difficult to find anything worthwhile. If you do have a good app, I’d suspect you’ll need an interesting blog to explain how it’s not just another useless toy.
Mobile apps are in their infancy. A lot of crap is being throw against the wall. But they are here to stay. No one has even dreamed up the mobile apps that will dominate the future. As the form factor changes and the available doodads develop the software will catch up. Hardware always leads software.