Fon11 discussion on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog
Jeremiah wrote “Fon11 is a vendor planning on creating a social network for iPhone users. But why limit this to a particular phone type? Why not extend this to all mobile devices.”
Here is our reply on this blog:
Joshua, you’re right. iPhone is only our reference platform. Our strategy is to release a library of REST APIs for both Fon11 and OpenLandmark, and a development sand box. This is coming soon. There are so many phones, and the platforms are very fragmented. We can easily modify the current mobile Web code to support other WebKit browsers. However, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile will require some rewrites. Phones without a full browser will require rich clients (local apps). It’s impossible for us to target so many platforms. Therefore, our strategy is to partner with independent developers to spread the network.
Jeremiah, thanks for raising the question. I also agree with the fatigue observation. Our goal is not to create another network, but to participate in existing networks. To put it in another way, we want to bring location-based services (LBS) and crowd computing (social network) to the applications we use everyday.
You can follow the active discussion on Jeremiah’s blog here.
