Social "Status" is the killer app

Everything seems to be coming together to make social "status" the next big thing on the web. Status has already taken off in various forms (IM, Facebook, Twitter, GPS), but the big picture is now coming into focus and it looks awesome. I wanted to talk about it here on the Browzmi blog because it's shaping our thinking about how we move forward.

I'm referring to "Status" as updates on what you are doing. By social status, I mean sharing what you are doing with your friends and others. (Some people may refer to status by another label - "presence.")

There are several types of status that can be shared. The most commonly used status is "online," which enables instant messaging. But now we have other status updates to share:

• Friend status: "Travis and Artem are now friends," which drove Facebook's growth.
  
• Activity status: "What are you doing now" like we share in Twitter.
  
• Surfing status: "Travis posted 3 new photos on Flickr." Or like Browzmi, where we share in real-time where you are surfing.
  
• Location status: GPS-enabled display of your physical location, which is now easier to share via your iPhone.

With the availability of these different status updates across multiple applications, we're seeing the growing popularity of "Status Aggregation," where you can see these updates from your friends from multiple sources and talk about them. The Facebook newsfeed defined this experience, but Friendfeed and others in the "lifestreaming" space are taking it across services.

What's really cool is that the distribution of Status updates is growing in scope across more services, meaning you can see what your friends are up to regardless of what app they are using.

And even cooler yet, the speed in which these Status updates can be shared across services is accelerating to a real-time experience, meaning that the moment your friend does something, you receive an update in real-time. We use XMPP to enable the events and chat in Browzmi, so we really like to see the efforts being made to facilitate and accelerate the flow of updates across services (see Gnip for example).

So if you combine cross-service distribution of Status updates with real-time sharing, I think you end up with the next generation IM conversation. Just like IM, this conversation is a real-time dialogue between friends online. Better than IM, this conversation is enriched with the context of social Status. Now we have so much more to talk about - because we can see our new friends, our current activity and where we're located, and where we're surfing and what we're doing online all in real-time; like we're there together.

This is the killer app I want.