This wonderful video shows the incredible infographics at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference WWDC 2009 - it showed the "live" download of the top 20,000 apps from iTunes App store. It's generated a lot of buzz - and for good reason. While not quite a by-the-second recreation of what's happening at the App Store â€" as the results are delayed by five minutes â€" the "live" mural has each iPhone app's icon pulse light outwards in a ripple whenever someone downloads that app.
What's really interesting is what it represents:
- There are now 50,000 + iPhone (and iPod Touch, so iPhone OS) applications less than a year since release of iPhone 3G.
- The displays are representing 20,000 of the most downloaded applications
- More than 1 billion apps downloaded, the milestone was reached in April 2009, again less than a year since iPhone 3G
- 3,000 apps are downloaded every minute
- New iPhone 3G S is faster, with video capabilities & even edit your video on the phone and share it straight to YouTube
I am an unashamed iPhone champion, I got one the day it was released in Australia. However, there are loads of detractors who keep looking for an iPhone killer, lauding Android, Blackberry and various Palm and Windows OS devices.
The figures from Apple are significant enough to keep the competition at bay at least for the moment:
So how does iPhone shape social media?
Let's look at popular iPhone apps and stats on content generation.
Back in May 2008, I felt Twitter combined with GPS was going to explode on iPhone. It was scarily accurate, and my Twitter use increased thousandfold after getting iPhone Twitter apps and enjoying the experience of social on the go. It seems I'm not the only one posting mobile status updates, looking at Mashable and TechCrunch lists of the most popular Twitter apps:
Mashable has Tweetie, Twitteriffic and Twitterfon (all iPhone Twitter clients) in the top 10
TechCrunch has Tweetie as number 5 and Twitterfon as number 13 in the top 21
The iPhone Facebook app was the number one free app downloaded in 2008 on the iTunes store. There are currently more than 8.6 million active monthly users of the iPhone Facebook application worldwide. That's quite a lot of mobile status updating, sure its not huge compared to the hundreds of millions of Facbook users, but my guess is the Facebook iPhone app users are probably an actively updating bunch.
Flickr
Flickr has a mobile version of its site that looks great on iphone. But the most compelling story is in content creation. Just look at this chart of the most popular cameraphones by Flickr members. What's even more significant, out of all the cameras on Flickr, the iPhone is the second most popular after a"real" digital SLR cameras Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi. It's outstripped 3 other popular digital SLRs since its launch. Read: pro-sumer digital SLR photographers and iPhone users are the most prolific sharers on Flickr
YouTube
It's really hard to find usage stats on iPhone YouTube access, probably because its built into the iPhone OS. From early 2008, the figures were iPhone users were 30 times more likely to access YouTube compared to regular mobile web users. From 2009, it jumps to 37% of iPhone users watched online video, but the rest of mobile world has caught up, (iPhone users 6x more likely to watch video compared to regular mobile users)
My next prediction is going to be the explosion of YouTube videos being filmed edited and uploaded from new iPhone 3G S
MySpace
The MySpace iPhone app is number 5 of the social networking free apps on the Australian iTunes store. No readily available data on how many active users are accessing from the iPhone, but given its download popularity, it would be high.
Mobile Web
AdMob metrics from April 2009 gives us the perspective of how much iPhone punches above its weight. AdMob report shows iPhone OS had 8% of smartphone market share globally, but generated 43% of mobile web requests and 65% of HTML usage. That's 8% of iPhones generating 65% of mobile web traffic.
Mobile advertising
Ogilvy blogs reported that iPhone users are 23% more likely to respond to mobile advertising. Looking at the stats for mobile web traffic, it makes sense given the amount of mobile web traffic generated from iPhone OS.
Its a pretty compelling story of how iPhone OS feeds users and content to major social media and social networking sites, and helps keep users connected, anywhere 3G access is available.
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