UPDATED 08:50 EDT / MARCH 07 2013

Just.Me from Jordan NEWS

Just.Me: Is It “Just” the Paradigm Shift in Social Networking?

The much anticipated Just.Me iOS beta goes live Monday, but here’s a fresh look at why the mobile messaging startup is an important moment in digital developments. 

Just.Me from Jordan

A capture from Just.Me Founder Keith Teare’s trip to a conference in Jordan

Just.Me offers a whole new perspective on flexible where mobility meets social. Developed by the co-founder of TechCrunch,  Keith Teare, this latest entrepreneurial endeavor on his part is actually a bit of a “sleeper” – here’s how.

The gist of Just.Me’s value can be fairly easily summed up actually. A free application, the service lets users record life events via the powers imbued within smart devices, for keeping and/or sharting among friends and networks. And, while this may be an oversimplification, the real power of Teare’s new toy actually resides in the mobile phone or tablet (soon) the user owns. How so? This is the interesting part of Just.Me’s story.

To better understand the powerful statement Just.Me is making, it is really necessary to understand a bit about Keith Teare and Archimedes Labs. The video below, if the reader will bear with me, reveals not only a brilliant mind behind lots of innovation, but what Teare refers to as “residues of the past” – it is crucial for us to understand that paradigm shifts occur quite often actually, and Just.Me is one of a few startups in the mobile space with just this sort of potential leading toward “next” mobile. After the video, please continue reading.

Now, the astute among you will have sliced from this video at least the trend indicator of apps-versus-browsers concept Teare has presented here. While it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that mobile will soon supplant desktop use completely, surprisingly few developments out there actually have disrupted the new space. And where the “silo” approach to social networking now exists, a far broader “connectedness” is on the horizon.

Now, look at the image from my iPhone showing Just.Me in use. Next, interject mentally something else Teare has said; “phones are a social network”, if ever there were a powerful statement (theory perhaps). What if the next Sony, Google, Apple, or even Amazon phone were it’s own “Facebook”, so to speak?

What’s significant about the cheesy image below? Isn’t this how we are connected at the personal level? I mean inside mine and your contact list on our smart phones? Nebulous as a concept, I know, but as Teare points out, the capacity of smart devices to compute within themselves is beginning to make obsolete the desktop or laptop’s power – speed, storage, and inherent function. But more about Just.Me the public app, and less about newly designed wheels. Soon you and I will have all manner of goofy photographic moments, histories, and even meaningful data up in the Just.Me cloud.

Just.Me

Yeah, just me, using Just.Me excuse the morning hair thingy

This in depth TechCrunch article by Natasha Lomas speaks volumes about the theoretical power of Just.Me or any innovation slated to supplant the current “stand alone” network giants. But usability wise (playing around with Just.Me in beta) is the only real way to get a feel for the product. Just as Lomas reveals, Just.Me is based on three levels of mobile application with the residual power of Twitter – only more powerful due to the unlimited nature of the stores and shares – the “only me” tab, “shared” tab, and “public” tabs of the UI may not be missile science, but the rich nature of potential life shares is. I took the image above (sorry for the lack of clarity) just to validate “me” grabbing and image of me grabbing and image to manipulate. While there’s no technology wonder going on there, I hoped to exhibit the simplicity a little.

Just.Me logoBack to the “core” theory of Just.Me here, as Teare discussed with TechCrunch, and with me via Facebook yesterday, the weight of trillions of SMS, text, voice, and other inputs into mobile, these almost beg for a social tie or community. Where Facebook and G+ leave off, the coming (perhaps soon) mega-community of smart (thing) users could be dominated by such theories (and practices if Teare has his way). What does the current app offer by way of mind splitting technology?

In case you have not already learned, the technology out there to do just about anything you see on Star Trek is in solid form in many cases. Just.Me is still in its “beta” birthday clothes, it’s true. Innovation, especially the disruptive kind is not always about the newness of gears and pulleys, even more often paradigm shifts come via needs, trends, and fundamental ways of doing things – such as the industrial revolution – which was really about “applying” technology. Herein resided Keith Teare’s chance at tech immortality. In our back and forth on IM Keith encapsulated why Just.Me is an innovation so;

Just.Me capitalizes on this shift in the center of gravity by building media capture services and sharing or publishing services, on the smartphone itself. It uses the address book as the place where all sharing decisions are processed.”

Finally, the interface, how you can best make use of this new network operand? The second video from Just.Me below does a great job of explaining how the tool works. I was a bit limited here in sharing and showing with you, not because of some flaw in the beta, but because I was on my wife’s iPhone and my email, contacts, and so on were not stored. I assure you, you can create a very nice loop of sharing and cataloging instances even in this early version.

Will Just.Me see massive adaptation? This seems a bit irrelevant, for me at least. It’s Keith Teare’s and the people at Palo Also incubator Archimedes Labs’ theories and initiative here that is the story. My biggest question for now is; “who will the market share of the coming mobile community first?”


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