Create Share Consume and Organize

Something I thought just a bit about today was the different reactions we as digital people have to new applications and services depending on what they do for us and how they integrate with the networks we are already a part of. Apps that give us new ways to create, share, consume, and organize seem all elicit different levels of excitement.

Some apps, like Pulse, even give users the tools to all four of these activities. They can organize their news feeds, they can consume them in a rich way, they can share the articles they find that they like, and even create a website with all those shared stories.

A new app to read RSS feeds or look at our Twitter stream can change “consumption” of media and has an impact on advertising, on mainstream media, on the print industry as a whole. Then, a new application that makes organizing and writing and accessing documents device agnostic, and fully cloud synced, gets little attention in comparison.

When an app like Flipboard hits the scene then it disrupts where people go to read content, where they get their content from, and what they can do with their content. A neat example of sharing on Flipboard is how their article “comments” are all integrated with users’ Twitter accounts.

A consumption app is going to do different things than a tool for writing. In fact, you already know what an app for consumption is going to do, who knows what people might do with a tool for creating?

Malcolm Bastien