Radu43 - Disruptive Innovations

Whrrl is an iPhone social network that centers around the concept of “story telling” . The hope is that people would want to share location based story and events. Whrrl makes it very easy to enter your location (iPhone GPS) and start you story. 

Once you have you story entered, your friends can add comments, let others know about the event and network with everybody.

You might say that you can do that with twitter already, simple add an hash-tag and start the conversation.  However Whrrl makes this process much easier for you. 

1. Whrrl knows your location. This creates a unique identifier.
2. Whrrl lets you interact with the story, even though you do not know the person that started the story.
3. You can easly see who else is at the event or involved in the story. Great real-time network opportunity

Now the question is; Will Whrrl make it? My guess is, probably not. This is not because Whrrl is not good, it is just we are oversaturated with social apps at the moment. I personally can only deal with Twitter and Facebook, building up a new network is just to time consuming. I will keep Whrrl on my iPhone for the next 3 month or so, just to see if maybe over time Whrrl can gain critical mass and became useful, if not I probably going to end up deleting it. So download it today and prove me wrong, I would like see Whrrl succeed. Would have made it easier for me to find good parties at SXSW!

Last week at SXSW I attended a very good session hosted by the guy behind @JetBlue, Morgan Johnston. The session happened to be in a one of the smaller rooms and unfortunately it reached full capacity about 15 minutes prior to the session even starting.  Sorry for the guys that could not make it, but I hear there was an equally good spontaneous session that formed outside the room. 

It was great to see a how @JetBlue totally gets IMO how to use Twitter to provide a service and create value for there customer. He understands that a brand on Twitter is very different then your personal twitter account, you set the expectation that the content you provide (Tweets) will be in context of JetBlue and relevant to everybody following the account. Twitter is not just like RSS, people can interact with you and the interaction is what makes the experience personal.

On the other hand I got pretty annoyed how @SouthwestAir is using Twitter. For what ever reason, the person behind @SouthWestAir thinks that they are some sort of rock star. Her Tweets are full of personal experiences, that in her mind project a human face to the account. After all planes can’t twitter, as she claims on her bio.  Wrong, I probably would care more about planes twittering then having a twitter account simply waste my time. Why do I care what the person behind @SouthwestAir does? Is that not what personal connection are for? Do I really need a brand to add to the already existing twitter noise? I say no. As I said before, if I decide to follow a brand on twitter, I have the expectations to receive something in return. When I follow #delloutlet, I would want to see offers for cheap computers. I follow @OokongDeals to see deals on amazon.com that might interest me. I follow @JetBlue, because it provides me with the opportunity to ask for help as well as monitor deals and special promotions. I will un-follow @SouthwestAir, because it is just wasting my time with personal information I never asked for. This must be the best part about Twitter, it is so easy to opt in and opt out of the conversation.