Benedict Evans:
“by plugging into the address book, camera, photo library, notifications etc the frictional barriers to doing a new social app fade away: the smartphone is a social platform in the same way that Facebook is. The obvious expression of this is WhatsApp and similar things that directly address the core Facebook use cases. But it seems to me that there’s at least as much potential in doing things that use the platform without trying to take over a core use case – things like throwing sheep. That is, the smartphone social platform enables a lot of experimentation with new ideas and behaviors that don’t need to be your core comms channel and that would never have worked on the web, and (for a bunch of reasons) might not have been possible on the desktop Facebook platform.”
