During the recent Tsunami in Japan, the internet infrastructure upon which Twitter and Facebook (including their mobile equivalents) are based, was taken offline in eastern Japan near the epicenter of the earthquake. However, social networks that were built on the widely distributed feature phones in Japan continued to transmit messages over GPRS (General Packet Radio Service). As a result, 80% of short message communication during the disaster was made on the social network maintained by Gree , a leading social network which is embedded on these feature phones distributed in Japan. * This brought me to realize that other internet initiatives in markets dominated by feature phones could leverage similar approaches to get communities onto the web grid. Most networks in the developing world are feature phone-dominated. Though they may lack the GPRS network of Japan, they do have the ability to distribute bundled apps pre-loaded into the widely distributed low cos...
Musings on web development, apps and the future of the internet.