So, the guys at Motherapp built my blog into an app, which actually also has Twitter and stuff blended in, and it turned out pretty cool. Oh, and it’s free.

Want it?

[chrisbrogan.com] iPhone App (will open iTunes)

Photo credit oskay

This entire story is true. It was first live-tweeted on Thursday, July 9th, and took place at the Apple Store at the Maine Mall in Portland. Here the story is, in its entirety, in little bite sized chunks.

Guy Grilling the iPhone Guy

Guy across from me is GRILLING the iPhone guy, and the questions suggest he’s recently arrived at this planet. “I can CALL people?”

Guy grilling the iPhone guy – “Wait. Can you find my HOUSE on this?” Not kidding. “Go down the street a little. That’s Bill’s house!”

Guy grilling the iPhone guy – “Now, if this thing could take PICTURES and upload them, now that would change EVERYTHING.”

Guy grilling the iPhone guy – “I wonder how often they CHANGE those photos?” (google maps streetview).

Guy grilling the iPhone guy – “Now, is sending email COSTLY?” (I’m half laughing, half ready to Taze him.

Guy grilling the iPhone guy – “Would you DEMO sending an email? I want to see if I get it.” (I’m SURE he won’t buy this.)

Guy Grilling the iPhone Guy – “So, you just TOUCH it to type? That’s CURIOUS!” – I want to take him to Hot Topic next. “Piercings?”

Guy Grilling the iPhone Guy – “So, what is the BIGGEST question people ask you about the iPhone?” iPhone Guy: “yours?”

iPhone guy to Griller – “My Dad, who’s probably older than YOU, really loves it. They LOVE it. THey won’t stop touching it.”

Guy Grilling the iPhone guy – “So, on a regular phone, I can’t get all this information. I feel like I’ll save money with this.” Um…

Guy Grilling the iPhone Guy – “Let’s just say I want to call my friend Chris. Do I have to set up a contact, or can I just say, Call Chris?”

(I’m a little weirded out that he said Chris, but it turns out the iPhone Guy’s name tag says Chris.)

Guy Grilling the iPhone is now TALKING to the iPhone like Scotty in Star Trek 4. “Hello Computer!”

Guy Grilling the iPhone Guy – “Hey, what about covers for these? Can I buy covers?” (Standing in front of WALL o’ “covers.”

God’s Truth, I am NOT making this up.

Guy Grilling the iPhone – “So what’s the warrantee cover? For example, can I just blow this thing up and get a new one?” (pyroguy?)

Guy Grilling the iPhone Guy – “How long do you think this thing will live?” iPHone Guy- “I left mine on the roof of my car, and its okay.”

Guy Grilling the iPhone Guy – “Do you have a repair shop out back?” followed quickly with, “And if I just want to make a call?” (???)

Guy Grilling the iPhone Guy – “How MANY people can I call at once? 10?” (He’s evidently also very convivial.)

Guy Grilling the iPhone Guy – “Text messages. Huh. Now what’s this? Is this… is this an email?” iPhone guy looks SO earnest.

Guy Grilling the iPhone guy is now back in Google Maps trying to find other friends he knows. iPhone guy is pretending this is useful.

Guy Grilling the iPhone guy – “Look! There’s that castle!” So he’s googlemapping Scotland?

LAST Guy Grilling the iPhone Guy update – wait for it – … he did NOT buy the iPhone. iPhone Guy didn’t bat an eye.

—

Yep, that’s the whole story, start to end. It was about one hour tops in length. I tweeted the whole thing live from a Macbook Pro on display in the Apple store. I almost got caught twice because my shoulders were jerking from laughing a bit too obviously.

Ah, life. There is absolutely no caloric value in this story, but it was fun to do.

Dunkin Donuts just built a site and an iPhone app to make it easier. Introducing Dunkin Run. (By the way, I’m not working with Dunkin Donuts at all. I just like this kind of useful-but-simple tech.) The tool is just a simple ordering and setup tool that lets you email or text your friends, tell them when you’re leaving, and give them the option of ordering stuff from Dunkin Donuts.

Simple, eh? And useful, and a clever move by Dunkin’s, as it means that people will order appropriately, and maybe even a bit more than they normally would order.

I just love simple apps that add value to an interaction with an offline company.

What’s your take?

She has started a tribe. What I’m excited about is how some new technologies (and some that we’ve already been using) will enable even more useful interactions. I’m particularly excited by what Nine Inch Nails have done (more below).

Last week, I saw community building in Detroit. The week before, I was at the heart of it in Southern California. In all of these places, little tribes formed around thoughtful leaders. They are intentional communities. Seth taught me a bit about the leader’s role in all this. In fact, while reading the advanced copy of Tribes on the side of a lake while my daughter took swim lessons, I read the part where Seth told us that all tribes needed a leader. It was the subtitle of the book, actually: “we need you to lead us.”

True story: when the point Seth was making sank in, I emailed him and said something very much like, “You bastard. You’ve just explained several of my own personal failures of the last few years.” He did.

The thing was, I was trying to build autonomous communities, where I felt they could run themselves. I tried it with several of my projects starting in 2006. I’d build something, get a bunch of people excited, and try to let it go to the wild. Every time, it would falter almost at once, no matter how passionate people were. Transferring ownership was never the same as finding a leader. (Again, nothing bad about the people involved, and everything bad about my inability to understand this point).

What’s Next: nin:access

I am blown away by nin:access, the iPhone application for Nine Inch Nails fans. On the surface, it’s not immediately obvious why it’s sexy. Here’s what they say about it:

• Exchange messages and photos with other NIN fans in your neighborhood and around the world

• Access NIN news, photos, custom wallpapers, and your nin.com inbox

Here’s a few screen captures:

Look at that second one. Location-based. It is a listing (opt-in) of fans of Nine Inch Nails geographically, so that you can, should you wish, connect up with other fans in an area. (Yes, I know that the example text isn’t all that enlightened, but think beyond what you see.)

You Can Have It All

Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails have it figured out. Empower fan-to-fan interaction. They’ve had that with their message boards, with their nin.com mail service, with all their other actions over the last years. But with the location-enabled iPhone app, it just feels even more super powered.

You can do this, too. There’s not a lot of super high end tech in what they did (not dissing NIN). It’s just good marketing for a great community. Not ready to plunk down some money on an iPhone app that will do this? You could always use BrightKite as a starting point to understanding what it’ll do for you. (If you want to build an iPhone app that does this, I could get that done for you.)

Location plus peer-to-peer interactions = a huge win.

A Quick Community Checklist

What if you’re Siobhan Bulfin or someone else looking to empower a little community of intent? What would be a way to do it? Here’s a quick little roadmap that might be useful:

• Name the Community Something Inclusive. (In the case of Nine Inch Nails, they’ve self-selected to gather around the band. Sometimes, it’s not as easy to make it about a product or company. Find a name that folks feel like they can own, something they can put on a flag of their own and hoist high (if that makes sense).
• Buy the URL for that name or something close.
• Make sure you understand the value to your prospective members for joining the community. Are you an information-sharing site, a business networking group, a creativity group? What are the ways in which everyone will be able to participate and contribute? What’s the “fire” that you’re gathering around? ( This is the “Channels vs. Communities argument that Stephen Saber makes.)
• Start with a simple Ning community, if you expect your group to be fairly small and if you don’t need high end power community tools.
• Put up a Flickr group so that there’s a place to put community photos.
• Think up a few meaningful tags that people can apply to any media, should they want to write about your group, the events, whatever as it relates.
• Start an email list by asking folks to opt in. Email marketing is still very successful in building community and driving relations. If you want everyone to have the ability to mail the group, consider using a simple service like YahooGroups for people to opt into to receive messages.
• Would a location-based tool like BrightKite be useful?
• Should you hold Tweetups?
• Do people want to publish a shared list of users on other social services, like Twitter and/or LinkedIn?
• Find ways to deliver value.
• Find ways to deliver more value.
• Find ways to encourage participation (another blog post in its own right).
• Find ways to gather the tribe around your various issues of interest.
• Find ways to facilitate peer-to-peer sharing, as well as member-driven media making.
• Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I’m encouraged by the “nin:access” application released by Nine Inch Nails. It points towards another way to enable communities of passion. I think there’s great value in building around these ideas, and that there’s much more to be done here in this space.

What’s your take? Does the above list help? What other elements have you built into your community building?

The automated voice is actually getting pretty decent. I used the product almost a year ago, and it’s improved tons.

John has a video about how to get more out of the service:

This morning, I felt like taking a walk. So, I grabbed my iPhone, to use it like an iPod, but ended up taking pictures along the way. I snapped all kinds of shots of my beautiful small town in New England, because it’s autumn, and the leaves are changing, and this is the prime time to show why people live their lives in New England (never mind that this lasts only 2 weeks usually).

I decided to share these photos on Twitter using Twitpic, which is integrated into Twitterific on the iPhone, but is easy enough to use on smartphones that have email capabilities and cameras. So, as I walked along, I’d snap a photo and write a quick blurb about it:

One interesting point: someone that I’d been “courting” lately, with comments and other touches to try to get “top of mind” for a moment dropped me a reply in twitter to the pictures. Never once to a blog post. Never to a comment on that person’s blog. But instead, this person responded to a photo of my beautiful New England town.

Think hard about that fact. Reaching people isn’t a linear business. Connecting isn’t a single effort. It’s a web of effort.

When wondering why your efforts aren’t having enough impact, think about this point: could you try a more multi-faceted approach? Are there other means to connect than the ways you’ve already tried? What else might you find in common with someone?

Essentially, by adding your url at Mofuse.com, you can spit back out a perfectly pretty mobile version of your blogging content. Slick, eh?

Hat tip, Doc Searls.

Jon Udell is one of my favorite smart people in computing technology. His podcasts with IT Conversations are top shelf (if you’re in tech, the whole series is great, but Jon stands out and helps me suffer through missing Daniel Steinberg’s “Distributing the Future” podcast). But I digress.

This is tech talk, but Jon helps us think about it in plain English. Check it out, because it should influence your thoughts about social software, web presence, and the power of a people-centric web.

Read the full article here

BONUS round: read this piece by Om Malik about the new iPhone’s GPS features and how it enables location-based services (LBS). Mix and match from Jon’s piece and Om’s piece, and if I had venture money, I’d put a BOATLOAD down on something in between.

Email

People want their email. It’s the main request for mobile devices. We BlackBerry types have used email for years. We wanted the Internet and cameras (just showed up in Berries a year ago). But the rest of you seeking smartphone features wanted email.

Note: my BlackBerry Curve supports 10 email accounts on one phone, so I get my primary mail service (Gmail) plus my corporate, plus 8 more.

Buttons

Yes, I’ll grant that the iPhone is sexy, and that for a while, it sucked conversations out of the room because once one came out, everyone would stop what they were talking about and go into how hot iPhones are. But here’s one: my phone has buttons. I can type words the first time, without asking Apple to guess what I’m saying. (Given some of the more arcane curse words I sometimes type, I don’t want Apple guessing). This becomes useful when typing under the table in meetings.

Everything Else

Okay, the iPhone is a media killer. It’s half iPod on its mother’s side. You win there. It’s a better browsing platform. Even now that I have wifi, the iPhone has a much nicer browser. The widgets you can put on an iPhone are amazing. You’ve got all that, and I won’t take that away.

So the question becomes: what do you want from your phone? After voice, what comes next?

Tell you what I want to do on my BlackBerry Curve: edit the menus. There are options there I will *never* push. Can I remove them? I haven’t found out how yet.

And before you get all “you hate Apple” on me, I’m writing this on a black Macbook, which is seven feet from a white Macbook, which is 15 feet from a Mini, 20 feet from an old iMac, and 30 feet from an Apple TV.

What’s your phone of choice?