Seesmic and Evernote bring social memory to your iPhone (and Android, too)
Twitter and Facebook have fundamentally changed the way we interact and communicate with one another. Sadly, both services have a major shortcoming: it's nearly impossible to save something and find it later.
Context & Ripple Effects
Seesmic had just launched its iPhone client, while Evernote had already brought its note-taking service to Android. The integration gives Seesmic users on both mobile platforms a way to turn items from social streams into material they can retain and retrieve.
The move arrives as Evernote has passed 3 million users, giving a social-client feature a larger destination for saved information rather than treating a timeline as the permanent record.
First-order effects
- Seesmic users on iPhone and Android can send social items into Evernote, adding a searchable personal archive alongside the social feeds they browse.
- Evernote gains a capture path from Seesmic’s social-stream audience, extending its use from standalone notes to saved social activity.
Second-order effects
- Seesmic’s mobile client competes on retrieval as well as feed reading, pressuring other social clients to make transient posts easier to preserve and find.
- Twitter and Facebook remain the places where activity occurs, while Evernote becomes a separate destination for users who want to retain selected material beyond the feed.
Third-order effects
- If cross-app saving becomes a common mobile behavior, control over a user’s personal archive can shift toward services that organize and retrieve information rather than the services that generated the stream.
The trend: Mobile social software is beginning to pair real-time feeds with independent personal-memory tools that make selected activity reusable after it leaves the timeline.