It’s easy to think of user generated content as being an Internet phenomenon when it has actually been happening in offline publications for a very long time. The only difference nowadays is that creating and submitting content requires far less effort. A decade ago (give or take) we could suddenly send messages without the slightest hesitation. I found out about the ramifications of this when, aged 16, I responded to my favourite columnist’s call for readers to tell him what annoyed them the most. At the time, the remote control to my family’s television annoyed me the most, most notably because of certain family members’ incompetence with its volume control functions. A few weeks later, I had forgotten sending a message from my Hotmail account, explaining how I’d finally come to understand why Elvis used to shoot television sets. I’d signed my name “Jane from Hawke’s Bay,” and I still remember my mother’s astonished face and inability to form words when she came across a very familiar story within the pages of the New Zealand Listener. Thankfully, she found my anecdote amusing. For our small percentage of Kiwi readers, please note that I’m not from Hawke’s Bay; I just suffered the misfortune of living there for a time. I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea or anything.
Not all of us have had our emailed rant published in a national magazine, but most people have sent email messages that they might never have posted if the method of delivery had been a little slower or more complicated. I definitely had a newfound respect for the power of Hotmail. Skip ahead seven or eight years, and we have found even more freedom to post whatever we like online, not only because of the liberties given to readers through commenting systems, reviews, and blogs, but because we no longer have to be sitting at a desktop computer to use the Internet. In fact, Internet access is spreading into areas previously unheard of, such as onto aeroplanes… or “airplanes”, if you think that was spelled incorrectly. Thanks go out to Kid Disco, whose December blog post on the subject reminded me of this further reason why JetBlue is wonderful. If you need more reasons aside from DIRECTV, blue chips, and direct flights to the Caribbean, check out how their pilots handle dodgy situations. Way_to_keep_your_cool.
JetBlue’s new wireless capabilities have a little way to go until they’re the same as a regular Internet connection: the wireless access will only work with “Yahoo!® Mail, Yahoo! ® Messenger, and BlackBerry email and BlackBerry® Messenger services,” and the small-print makes it clear that the service is still very limited. However, this signifies the end of the road for net-less plane rides. That trip to Australia just got a bit more expensive since you’ll now want to go and buy some extra long-life batteries. In the near future, we will all be able to surf the entire Internet from any aeroplane.
No news here. Who didn’t see this coming? What I find important about this sort of thing, however, is that deleting planes from the list of places where one cannot access the Internet brings the world that much closer to complete coverage. And since there isn’t very much to do on long aeroplane rides at the best of times, imagine how much time people will be able to waste in teh tubez when they’re stuck in… the tubes.
All of a sudden, I see airlines’ reputation management becoming a little bit more difficult. Say you’re on a long-haul flight of the Hawaii to New York variety. The cabin crew are rude and the food is vaguely reminiscent of curdled vomit. The cabin is either too hot or too cold at all times: just as you’ve broken out into a full sweat, the temperature drops so you’re shivering and wet. The movie is horrible and old. The left side of the headphones you bought from the rude crew for five dollars doesn’t work and your own headphones don’t fit with the aeroplane’s jack. The seatbelt sign has been on for two hours, despite the fact that there’s no turbulence. You’d drink away the pain, only you saw one woman who dared head for the bathrooms get screamed at to sit down, on account of the seatbelt sign.
Right now, you’ll fume for the eight hours and get off the plane. Cab to your hotel / connecting flight / trip back to your house. The memory of the plane ride is still there, but you have other things do to. You might get around to writing a letter of complaint or posting something online, but there is simply nothing better than a review that comes from the heart of a situation. Buckled into your seat, imagine the damage you could do, given a live online outlet!
I am no big fan of Twitter, but it is services like this that have benefited from the mobilisation of the web. Imagine (if you dare; I’d rather not) the Twitter updates produced by an experience like the one described above. (Yes, I know that there is a noun for the term “Twitter update.” I refuse to use it.) Imagine the potential for new categories at user-submitted review sites like Yelp.
Travel-specific sites, of which there are many hundreds, could feature maps, showing live updates from travelers as they fly on major routes. Sites could run weekly or monthly competitions for the best in-flight blog posts from a certain route: Singapore – Frankfurt is a particularly horrifying journey (especially if you started in Auckland), and I imagine that people could come up with some fantastic in-flight entertainment whilst confined by Lufthansa at 30,000 feet. It would be like the Best of Craigslist, but on sleep deprivation. The competition could be broken up by class… I’m guessing that the stories from Economy would be the best. The honest and unfiltered opinions of air travel consumers, whether those opinions be positive or overwhelmingly negative, are set to take up an unoccupied space in the social media market.
From a simplistic perspective, this means good things for travelers; however, you’d have thought that customer reviews would have drastically changed restaurants, bars, cafés, gyms, and shops. And yet you still come across slow service, surly staff, and bad equipment. The only reason that I think the air travel industry may be different is that, strapped into an aeroplane seat and armed with a laptop, people have very little else to do but entertain themselves with their computers.
SEO is an industry whose members travel more than most and we’ll have a very good time, given the Internet in the sky. I’ll welcome the day when I don’t have to choose between Live Free or Die Hard, The Simpsons Movie, and Hairspray to keep me occupied during long hours on planes.
