Ipad Will Be the Social Networker's Best Friend

Submitted by Tony Valle on Thu, 01/28/2010 - 10:33am

I don't know about you, but I had quite a hard time getting anything done yesterday afternoon. I couldn't help sneaking peaks at Gizmodo's live ipad coverage as the product was unveiled for the first time. With each refresh of the page, new and magical images were posted. I was almost in a trance.

I'll admit, I'm a sucker for anything new coming out of the Apple camp. I've owned several ipods. I also have an iphone and a macbook pro. Is there any question I'll own an ipad before too long?

As my brain works away on justifying the expense of yet another glossy gadget, it dawned on me that I might really be on to something here with the ipad. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the ipad will be an absolutely essential tool for social networkers!

I'll set out the following keys to social networking success, along with the reasons I think the ipad will deliver great benefit:

Routine

Good social networkers make posting to Twitter, Facebook, Ning, etc. part of their daily routine. Now let me paint the following picture about how I envision my morning routine changing with once I have the ipad. I'll stop by my local Starbucks, throw down a couple bucks for some overpriced, overly bitter, yet strangely NECESSARY coffee, and fire up my ipad to get going on my networking for the day. Doesn't that sound cozy?

Call me crazy, but the idea of firing up my laptop, and waiting for it to boot, and waiting and waiting and waiting, just doesn't sound fun. and the laptop is clunky. It just is. Now that I know the ipad exists, it's hard to get this comfy picture of what could be, out of my head.

Ease of Use

To really do social networking correctly, I have to do a lot with what little time I have. The ipad-ready iphone apps like Twitter, Facebook, Twitterrific, etc. are ready and waiting to make my job as easy as can be. When you couple the tailored apps with the fact that web browsing will be vastly more feasible on the ipad vs. the iphone, I think you've got a killer combination here.

On-The-Go

While the ipad can't really compete with the iphone when it comes to "tweeting at a stoplight," it's still exponentially more convenient than a laptop is. I'm not going to fire up my laptop to post a quick tweet that just came to mind, but I could easily see doing that with the ipad.

Web Browsing

If we really want to be great social networkers, we need great web browsing. We need to uncover the best of what's out there so we can share our findings with our readers. I've never really felt comfortable doing this on my iphone. It's just too small. I anticipate that the ipad will be a hugely better web-browsing experience.