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Today we officially announced that Rabble is expanding its on-deck reach to metroPCS subscribers. Cool that their promo link features the Ying Yang Twins channel. Yes, those Ying Yang Twins. As we continue to deepen our relationships with independent labels and bands, Rabble is proving to be a very media-rich mobile blogging community. Want to send D-Roc and Kaine a message to their mobile phones? They probably won’t let you have their phone number, but you can do the next best thing and send them a message through Rabble to their mobile phones – they’ve got a channel. (Ok, maybe that’s a bad example. I am sure they are busy enough to have an intern responding to their messages. But you never know.)

I just want to reiterate my respect for metroPCS. If they were in the San Diego market, this would be my carrier of choice and would replace my landline phone. They offer a value proposition that is hard for most consumers to resist: Low cost, unlimited usage. They don’t skimp on handsets, either, unlike some other carriers going after the low-cost quadrant. metroPCS has some very robust devices. They are expanding to new markets and now offer service in Dallas and Detroit. I am very happy they are providing Rabble to their subscribers. They may be a comparatively smaller carrier, but something about their business model or demographic appears to be driving Rabble subcriptions at a slightly greater rate. I’ll bet their subscribers likely consume more data as a whole than the national average.

Anyway. Thank you again metroPCS for bringing Rabble to your subscribers and helping us to continue expanding our footprint as the premier mobile blogging and social networking community.

I am on the Amtrak Surfliner heading to LA from San Diego and I am using my Verizon Wireless EVDO card to stay connected. I LOVE this service. I thought I would dump my T-Mobile Starbucks-fi service because of it, but I haven’t yet. I have an affinity to T-Mobile for some reason. I think on some level I feel like I should reward them for seeing the WiFi opportunity so early or something. Practically speaking, I spend a lot of time in various Starbucks and a lot of time at airports, and T-Mobile is in every Admirals Club. So even though the Verizon service is sufficient so far, I am happy to have more connectivity options.

I am also testing the LBS version of Rabble. We put it on a Boost phone because of their A-GPS network and handsets. It’s pretty cool. The train is going about 80 mph and every few minutes the location updates and shows me different things around me. We just passed Anaheim stadium and I found and sent a message to a Rabbler in Cypress. I immediately got a response. That part still surprises me – that when put into the right context, strangers act more like friends than even some of my friends do. This girl is a “cast member” at Disneyland. Would that be a good job? I hear The Mouse rules with an iron fist.

Anyway, LBS Rabble is pretty cool. It is the same as Rabble but instead of declaring location, there is no effort required by the user. In this mode, it feels like sort of a Vindigo for people that includes interactivity. Location really is a different experience from a web-based social networking site, where location is more or less irrelevant. Location and proximity sort of add a Z-axis, and the automatic location ID is neat.

You might find this interesting: We have noticed that users of Rabble 1.0 don’t so much care about specific location. General location and proximity matter, but not specific location. Rabble enables a user to specify their location at different levels down to the Place level, so you could say “I am in San Diego” or “I am in La Jolla” or “I am at Harry’s Bar and Grill.” Then you can also define your proximity, which works like a physical search radius. Most Rabblers define their location at the city or neighborhood level. We thought there would be a user case where people would want to create Places and then blog about them, sort of like a user-generated city guide, but this has not happened. People don’t do it because there is really no reason to. Places simply aren’t strong enough nuclei around which to create any kind of community, conversation or even interest, as it would appear. Rabblers are very interested, however, to know who is around them, and we see a sort of proximity browsing a lot.

It will be interesting to see how this evolves, but even the few specific-location applications we have seen don’t seem to get used much. I have seen a lot of business plans for Bluetooth social networking schemes that promise to hook you up with the hot girl who happens to be in the same bar as you at that very moment. Like many “lubricant technologies,” this has a big empty room problem in that the closer you define “proximity” the less likely that someone else is using the same technology as you.

Also…

I do not know Eric Rice personally, but I know his name in the new media industry. Someone sent me a link to a post he made about Rabble and I was really happy to see that someone as forward-thinking as Eric (he co-founded Audioblog.com) thought Rabble was so cool:

excerpt:

“Rabble. Is. Kick. Ass.

Forget what their site says. People who have a job to do, write like they have a job to do. I don’t have a job to do, so I can say this: Rabble is like a blend of things you know, but with better functionality and more usefulness. It’s an app for your phone that has the structure of Myspace, the awareness of your friends like Dodgeball, yet it doesn’t get in your face unless you want it to. It’s also bi-directional to the web so the blog posts on your site are replicated on your Rabble and vice versa. I can learn about the people, places, and things around me; see the pics, and a whole lot more.”

I like when people like what we are doing.

This reminded me that we have a demo of a future release of Rabble that has podcasting capability. (Yes, I realize to say “podcasting” is merely to be buzzword compliant. It can upload and download audio and video.) It isn’t really that hard to do from a technical standpoint, so it isn’t a big strategic push for us or anything, but we think user-generated media should and will evolve into various modes and our job is to help it along. The real issue is network impact and whether carriers even really want such a feature. So far, some do if it is marketed to pull subscribers into data plans.

I mention this because if you are going to be at CTIA and would like to see a demo of Rabble with integrated podcasting and LBS, please send me a note.

We enter the very large house of Cingular.

We have been focusing on establishing our international expansion for Rabble so I haven’t said much lately about our footprint in North America. (We’ll be launching on-deck in Latin America is several markets – more on that some other time.) We like to soft-launch before we announce, so although it has been available for several weeks on certain handsets, Rabble is now officially up on Cingular Wireless. You can find it on your handset in the Media Mall. Here is the link on the Cingular site. You can also get it directly from the Rabble website. Cingular is a big company with a lot of subscribers, most of which can now enjoy the beauty that is the instant gratification of mobile blogging for a scant $2.99/mo. We are happy that they brought us into the fold. Our on-deck reach is now over 100 million.

Remember that Rabble is both a tool and a community: On one hand, it has bi-directional publishing capability with sites like Blogger, LiveJournal, TravelPod, Zoto, Eventful, etc. and we are adding more all the time. In this way, Rabble is a sort of a mobile aggregator of web-based blogging and social networking sites. (We aren’t totally obvious about the integration part, but it is an important part of Rabble’s value to users. Ping me if you want to learn more.) On the other hand, it is also a fully self-contained mobile-centric community that enables people to create and share content right from their mobile phones, so a native mobile user who has never been on LiveJournal can start from their mobile device and have a great experience out of the box.

Anyway, Cingular rules for taking this step forward to offer this in-demand functionality to their subscribers. We like them.

I am happy to say that metroPCS is also currently soft-launched and we will be announcing it fully in a week or so. (So I guess you heard it here first.) Incidentally, metroPCS is a great company and a joy to work with. I really love the value proposition metroPCS offers: Unlimited flat fee prepaid. Talk all you want, same monthly fee. The MOST you can spend is $45 for unlimited local and long distance calling, unlimited text messaging and unlimited picture messaging. For consumers in their markets, how could they choose anything else? I am excited about this relationship. Compared to the national carriers, they may be a bit smaller, but they are giving consumers what they want, which probably means they won’t be smaller for long.

I feel like I owe you an overall update on Rabble, but the problem is that all the stuff I want to share is sort of secret until we launch the next version. I’ll try to share some more about that in the near future as we go into beta.

TravelPod today announced their integration with Rabble. TravelPod is a great site, btw. I believe verticalized user-generated content is the most disruptive force in media, and I see great value in companies focused on a specific media purpose. TravelPod owns the travel blogging space by taking familiar self-publishing conventions and adding functionality that fits their vertical. (Their itinerary map thing that allows you to place flags on a map of places you’ve been is very simple and cool, and adds a lot of value.)

As far as strategy goes, I think this announcement tips our hand a bit, so I figured I would share a little about where we are headed and why I love this cooperation with TravelPod. First of all, we want to enable TravelPod users to download the app and take it with them on their travels around the world, so obviously a J2ME client is on the way for the 4th quarter to accommodate not only growing distribution in the U.S., but also so that we can facilitate our pending expansion into certain international markets. I brought the J2ME build with me to Europe recently and it worked great – we are currently in testing across a large handset matrix and you’ll be able to get it soon. TravelPod is a bit ahead of the curve from a distribution standpoint, but only by several weeks.

We generally view Rabble as a tool and a community. That tool is powered by our platform that is basically a proximity-based media networking engine for the mobile space. Rabble uses a subset of the platform’s functionality. We have some other applications in development now that will be functionally very different from Rabble, but are still powered by the same platform.

With Rabble, we plan to create consumer value over time in two ways:

1) As a Tool - we will expand functionality by adding useful features. (Some of these things you can easily imagine, like audio and video support, presence, etc.)

2) As a Community - we will give the community more valuable services to interact with, making Rabble a mobile media and communications hub. (Last week’s announcement about all of the indy record labels putting their bands on Rabble to help fans connect with their favorite bands is an example.)

The TravelPod integration is a good example of the latter. You can use Rabble in its native state to interact with an active and growing community of mobile users focused on blogging, messaging and social networking, but you can also use it in conjuction with some other site or service. We don’t reinvent most web-based blogging and social networking sites, but we do add mobility very well, and make the functionality appropriately simpler for the mobile environment than on the web. Rabble is growing organically unto itself but is also a sort of consolidation point for different types of social and personal publishing services in the mobile environment, enabling users of these other services to put the respective functionality in their pockets.

Making mobile apps is hard. Getting distribution and integration with billing systems is hard. Making it all work in an international cross-carrier environment and meet triple-9 uptime SLAs is hard. But that’s what we’re good at, so companies like TravelPod can add a bolt-on mobile strategy that comes with favorable economics without really having to do any more heavy lifting than a one-time backend integration. For the cost of a few hours of an engineer’s time, TravelPod now has another way to serve its customers by enabling them to access and update their personal travelogues from their mobile devices. This is great because people on vacation don’t usually bring their laptops with them. It adds value to TravelPod and it adds value to Rabble. Both companies further their respective strategies, we both make a few bucks and everyone is happy.

I guess you could call this part of our strategy “Rabble as Appliance.” Think of it as a mobile link that gets added to the value chain for any kind of social application. It is one more way to keep your users connected to the value your site or service provides. It is also in the market now, doing well, growing in subscribers, and we are building a critical mass of active, paying users that can be leveraged by companies like TravelPod, which we are happy to do because “leveraging the user base” in this case actually means “offering more valuable service” to our already happy users. Rabble has bidirectional integration with sites like TravelPod, Blogspot and LiveJournal, and there are many more on the way.

When I think about self publication and communication from a user’s standpoint, I really don’t think there is one tool that adequately enables me to do all the things I want to do. I have my channel on Rabble, which I personally use more as a local community networking tool here in San Diego, though I have made friends in NY, TN, AZ and other states. Aside from my Rabble channel, I also have this blog, which is limited in scope to our company and industry, but is my primary two-way communication platform about both. I wouldn’t blog here about the recent trip I took to Spain. For that, I set up my TravelPod travelogue. I also use LinkedIn more now than I used to, you can find me on Skype and I use AIM for most of my daily communication. I also still use my mobile phone for voice, though it is surprisingly infrequent. (A data-only MVNO would make a lot of sense to me.)

I have no fewer than seven active points of communication, each a vertical functional island that serves a specific purpose. The number of my verticalized communication tools is expanding, but what they all have in common is that I want them to be available wherever I am and whenever I want to use them. That means I want them all on my mobile device. This is why our Appliance strategy makes so much sense to me. The LiveJournal brand is deeply important to its users. We don’t compete with them, rather we enable them in the mobile space, along with many other verticalized communication tools that all share common functionality with the superset of our platform’s capabilities. And it is all presented in a simple but robust package on mobile devices. Very tidy.

So, without actually posting our product roadmap, I hope I have shared enough to help you understand why the TravelPod integration is exciting not only on its own because their service is awesome, but also as an example of the kinds of media networking apps we are in the process of enabling. I also hope this explains a little bit how we architected the platform and where we see Rabble with respect to certain types of companies that may look competitive to us but that we actually view as potential partners. I’ll remember to make a post sometime soon to go deeper into our Platform strategy. I’ve gotten a few emails from people asking for more content about our status and progress, so I’ll try to stay up on that. It’s hard because I want to be as transparent as possible without sharing strategically competitive information, so I try not to talk about such things until they are just about to happen. If you need to know something specific, please just ping me via email.

Anyway, I want to thank TravelPod for having a vision for at-the-moment personal publishing. We appreciate them taking the first step toward mobility with us early on. The next version of Rabble will have much tighter integration with them, and more features that will make travel blogging easier.

Well, there really isn’t exactly a “winner.” BusinessWeek did a Best of the Web survey which recently concluded.

Readers voted in various categories for their favorite site/service/tool/whatever, and Rabble was vying for position in the “Toolbox: Wireless Services” category.

Rabble “won” its category with 77% of the votes, though they didn’t send us a trophy or anything. For as new as it is, and as limited as the distribution is currently, I am pleased to see its awareness and popularity already.

Click around on some other categories and you’ll find some interesting surprises, and maybe a site or two you hadn’t heard of.

TelecomWeb did the first product review we’ve seen of Rabble, and it was good! The title is Joining the Rabble: Making Mobile Community Work. (I know, there is a subscription required. Sorry about that, but take a look at some of their other story headlines and you might consider buying a subscription. They go pretty deep on a lot of topics important to our industry.)

I don’t think they’ll mind a few excerpts:

“We’ve played with VCast and Sprint TV, every 3D game under the sun and more WAP pages than we can name. But the one recent application that has us coming back for more almost every time we log into our phone is Intercasting’s new Rabble.”

That was very flattering. Our users, while a smallish group at the moment, tell us the same thing. Let’s hope we can continue to rev the product in exciting new ways to make it even better over time.

“Rabble is among the most dense applications we’ve seen on a phone, with a lot of information packed into relatively quick downloads and small-screen real estate. Nevertheless, the interface is clean and navigable, and a great deal of thought has gone into how the interface can encourage and grow the community. For instance, when in someone’s channel, you can see its subscribers and fans and then link to these like-minded Rabblers as well. This is a technique that helped make the wildly popular MySpace.com community site a place where people organically find and form communities based both on declared interests as well as common tastes in user-generated media.”

It is exceedingly difficult to manage screen real estate when you are trying to create a robust mobile application. There is a fundamental difference between the web and the mobile space that has to be recognized before you start developing a mobile application. This is the age of the single-purpose application. Any web-based portal looking to put their offering on mobile devices will have a difficult time doing so, simply because you don’t have 18 inches of screen real estate to work with. Along the same lines, key clicks matter. It is often better to tab through multiple screens with the click of the same key rather than try to implement some sort of “point and click” scrolling browse function. What all of this means to us is that the user experience starts with simplicity, and everything Rabble does is geared toward giving the user what they bought the app for in the first place. I know that sounds obvious, but I have used many apps that do not seem to keep this in mind.

“Rabble is nudging user-generated media to the next level, where it starts seeing itself as media and not just glorified diary postings. By naming people’s blogs “channels,” Rabble is massaging the users’ feeling that he or she is a “small media” maker, a programmer using the content of his or her own life or brain as a script. This is a compelling extension and realization of what the blog can be as both community and user-made media. The idea that individuals posting to the Web have “fans” and “subscribers” is itself a remarkable evolution of traditional passive media assumptions. It points to how interactivity, brought to its logical ends, disrupts old media-making and - consumption structures. In the Rabble world, we are both makers and consumers of media, star and fan, exhibitionist and voyeur.”

I think this is a great point. If you look elsewhere on our site, you will see that our vision, while perhaps broad in scope, is in fact very narrow in focus: We want to reverse the flow of the Media stream. An LMNO can take many forms in a variety of verticals, but closest to our heart is the promise of populist media. It is too easy to pander to consumers. Consumption is something we all understand, but I feel like there is a certain mild disrespect of consumers by the incumbent media industry that assumes too much about our collective lack of intelligence. Do you know how foie gras is made? You force-feed a goose (it doesn’t matter with what – grain, wheat, figs are all fine – just use whatever is cheapest) then later eat its oversized (and delicious) liver. As a consumer, I feel like the media industry sees us as geese, and indeed it seems at times that there is no limit to our ability to consume media, and quality clearly does not matter much. Your delicious liver is of course your wallet. Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it, in my opinion. It just seems very one-way to me.

When a billion people are walking around with media production devices, things will be different. Yes, we will always consume, but I think we will also collectively produce more than we consume. That is when things get really interesting to me, because when you are creating and consuming at the same time that is media interactivity. I don’t mean the kind of interactivity that lets you use your remote control to freeze your TV screen, zoom and buy whatever outfit the reality show star is wearing. (Though that would be pretty cool.) I am talking about full media immersion where you are the creator of the content as much as the consumer of it, where media is no longer about following a narrative and is instead about participating in the construction of the set design and the direction of the players in a story that has no script, no beginning and no end.

“There are burps to Rabble, of course. In a bizarre move that suggests Verizon Wireless doesn’t understand the application it is hosting, Rabble has slipped into a Messaging/IM sub-menu of the deck, where it is difficult to find in the first place. Pieces of the interface remain kludgy. Uploading images to a blog entry failed for us, in part because it required that we e-mail a cam image from the phone gallery to ourselves at a Rabble.com e-mail address. This didn’t work for us, and we were frustrated to find that the Rabble.com Web site is not yet equipped to manage a mobile blog or its gallery.”

We’re getting there. I am going to talk to the Verizon guys to see if we can try a different category. There just isn’t any logical category to put a mobile blogging/social networking/user-generated content production and consumption community application at the moment. Also, I’ll admit that despite our pretty good UI, it is kludgy in areas, but this is 1.0 and our growing community is definitely comprised of younger early adopters who have been great at providing us very useful feedback.

We aspire to 3.1 status, which we learned from Microsoft: Windows 1.0, launched back in the mid-‘80’s was a complete flop on which they actually lost money. It was sort of a front-end to MS-DOS that actually made DOS harder to use and less robust. Windows 2.0, released in 1987, while an improvement, you will remember was limited to 640k of memory and was also unsuccessful. Still they stayed at it. In 1990, they released Windows 3.0, which I remember had better multitasking and could use up to 16mb of RAM, was an improvement but frankly IBM’s graphical OS/2 was a superior product. 3.0 sales were good, and Microsoft hyped the release in a big way, but it was still inferior to IBM’s product and even their own MS-DOS 5.0, though they were on their way. Then in 1992, they shipped Windows 3.1, which was the first obvious mainstream commercial success in the Windows line and was the precursor to Windows 95, which was the first time they packaged both the OS (MS-DOS) and the GUI (Windows) together and the rest is history.

I don’t do the actual full history justice, of course. I just lived through it and bought every Microsoft product from MS-DOS 1.0. Along the way I saw them learning from each release and noticed that the things I would curse about a particular version of Windows would be fixed in the next release. They stuck with it for 10 years to build a true mainstream success. If they hadn’t started with 1.0 and instead tried to build 3.1 from the beginning, they never would have been successful because the market has to teach you what to build next.

Today Windows is so robust and intuitive that it feels transparently magic to me. Remember having to configure that SLIP/PPP bullshit with your external dial-up modem and having to maintain a list of local access numbers each with different access codes depending on the provider? That wasn’t that long ago. Now I walk into a Starbucks and my computer asks if I would like to wirelessly connect to the internets. Why, yes I would. Thank you. And they seem to have killed that damn anthropomorphized paperclip, a move which deserved it’s own release number, in my opinion.

Anyway. 3.1 is where we’re going, though I don’t intend for it to take 10 years to get there! So far people seem to really like Rabble, and we have many improvements planned for the next release that will hopefully make everyone like it even more. Don’t you think you should buy Rabble now and be all O.G. when we get to 3.1? I would appreciate the feedback.