Mobile is not an iterative step for the web, but a complete revolution. So instead of asking ourselves how we can adapt web-based stores to our smartphones, we should be asking how we can use unlimited access to information to help us when we are in actual stores. The full potential of the mobile revolution won’t be realized until we build the tools that make every moment of our lives better.

The internet squeezed onto mobile devices

It’s understandable that we use the web as the baseline for measuring mobile, especially since many of our most widely used apps and services originated online – email, text, maps, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and so on. The comparison has worked until now because we’ve spent our first years with smartphones reformatting the desktop experience of the web to fit into our pockets.

Today the web itself  is the product of decades of adapting the real world onto the connected desktop. First we ported over letters (email) and posters (websites). Then we moved what we could of traditional businesses online to the large screen perched on our desks: Bookstores and record stores became (literally) Amazon.com and iTunes; travel agents became Kayak.com and Yelp.com.

Since smartphones have brought computing power and an internet connection to our pockets, naturally we want those tools everywhere we go. But porting these advancements to our phones is only a pre-game to the real mobile revolution: when connectivity reshapes our minute-by-minute lives.

The offline opportunity

Opportunity is everywhere: The offline world is filled with friction, inefficiency, incomplete information, tedium and excess capacity. We feel it all the time. Waiting for elevators. Waiting for delivery drivers. Going across town only to find an empty bar. Forgetting the name of the person you just met.

These problems are so frequent and inherently human we are often blind to them. But for almost every problem we encounter, relief will be found in the same place: The device we carry with us. We don’t need to log in. Sensors minimize the information input. Smart assistants and voice recognition allow hand’s-free use and allow the least technically capable among us to use their deepest, richest features.

Last year saw the first mass implementations of phones making what used to be our offline lives better with companies like Uber and HotelTonight, but 2013 will be the year in which we start looking to our devices to scratch our every itch – for companionship, entertainment and much more.

Why now?

A number of these ideas have been around for a long time, but 2013 will be our first chance to build many of these new companies.

When Amazon.com started in 1994, less than 10 percent of U.S. adults were online. But even though that small segment of the population was spread around the country, everyone used the product in the same way whether the user was in Dubuque, Detroit or Dallas. Everyone hit the same website, bought the same things and was plugged into the same distribution network. In its infancy, Amazon only needed a tiny fraction of the country to use its services.

The comparison today with Uber, the real-time limo service, almost makes itself. Uber instantly pairs available drivers and cars with demand for rides. Crucially, Uber needs a critical mass of both supply and demand on its platform in the same geographical area, down to the same neighborhoods and streets, and needs to be able to update and match them in real time based on their current locations – a task nearly impossible to accomplish at scale on desktops or laptops. There are several forces beyond raw adoption numbers though that enable Uber’s success:

• Smartphones free us from our desks. When we have problems, questions or desires, we don’t need to return to our homes or offices to satiate them; we can address them on the spot.
• Touchscreens, Android and iOS are amazingly simple to use. Not only do people have the technology readily available to them, but even the least technically savvy can (and do) use it.
• Apps are simple, elegant problem solvers. Small, beautiful, and easy-to-use, the best apps are easily understood in seconds.

This is the year these trends will reach critical mass in almost every major market in the US. The result will be that more great companies will be started, gain meaningful traction and drive investment. More startups will get more tries at solving problems, and a virtuous cycle will accelerate the trends.

Bringing the offline world online poses unique hurdles and rewards

While some problems are easy to identify they may be difficult to solve. Unlike many of the first internet companies, the real world has legacy industries with entrenched lobbies, distribution providers or regulations. Many require real infrastructure that needs to be acquired, integrated with or leased. In the offline world, scale is often much harder than simply spinning up additional servers.

On the other hand, many of these new companies will become natural monopolies – difficult to overthrow once they achieve scale, lock up resources within their systems and start generating significant cash. Many are adaptations or improvements of current businesses, but given the inability of incumbents to design, develop and deploy revolutionary software, we can expect many to be upset by startups.

Looking to the future

Unlike any technology we have ever seen, mobile has the opportunity to improve our minute-by-minute lives, wherever we are. While there are unique perils to the offline world, the significant rewards to those that build these new companies more than offset the risk.

Companies like Uber and HotelTonight are just the tip of the iceberg. Square isn’t just revolutionizing payments, but the experience of paying for things in real life. A company like Highlight will eventually be a real-time, in-person LinkedIn that gives us context, history and information for all of our encounters.

Mobile isn’t a portal to the internet we know today, but a gateway to build world-changing companies that will upend entrenched incumbents and exponentially recast even the most bullish of mobile expectations.

Edward Aten is a designer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of CopThis and previously founded Swift.fm. Follow him on Twitter at @aten.

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Our RoadMap book contains 10 interviews and essays with some of the leading thinkers in web, mobile, product and device design, including Mike McCue CEO of Flipboard, Nest CEO Tony Fadell, designer Christian Lindholm, and the head of design for Parlay Labs, Scott Jenson.

Here’s our TOC:

1. The reinvention of the store for a connected world, interview with George Blankenship, Tesla Motors
2. 10 rules for designing the future, essay by Christian Lindholm, designer, entrepreneur
3. Attention to detail: designing for new frontiers, interview with Hosain Rahman, Jawbone
4. Marching backwards into the future, essay by Scott Jenson, Parlay Labs
5. The magic of good design, interview with Tony Fadell, Nest Labs
6. Find the story in your product, images & photos, Oren Jacob, Bobby Podesta, ToyTalk
7. The call of beauty over data, interview with Mike McCue, Flipboard
8. The qualified self: online identity finally comes of age, essay by Edward Aten, Swift.fm
9. Using data to design for your ears, interview with Tom Conrad, Pandora
10. The rise of augmented intelligence and data mapping, essay by Sean Gourley, Quid

Down the road you’ll be able to buy an ebook version of our book from GigaOM Books, but the printed and bound version will only be available to attendees at the RoadMap event. RoadMap will kick off bright and early this coming Monday morning (November 5)! Yes, it is rapidly approaching. See our awesome speaker list here, and buy the few tickets remaining here.

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Facebook is selling investors on the dream that the company is just getting started — not only with selling ad space on its current product, but in creating nearly an entirely new Internet, one where Facebook doesn’t simply create connections between sites and people but creates many different social products too.

This ambitious goal creates an interesting dichotomy. Although every hot startup wants to be the next Facebook, Facebook needs to be every hot startup as well. To execute its vision of total web dominance, Facebook is recreating and competing with nearly every significant Internet product of the last few years. It’s an unprecedented pivot that threatens Facebook’s core products and may eventually benefit the very same startups Facebook is trying to crush.

Back in the Day

For the first five years or so, Facebook helped users do three simple things: share photographs, status updates and links with friends. But somewhere along the line Facebook recognized two important facts:

1. If it was going to be worth tens of billions of dollars, it needed to attract hundreds of millions of eyes to the site every day. To do this, it needed to be a portal for every type of content, or better yet, the shell for all consumption of that content. In other words, they needed to become the entire Web.

2. New companies, like Twitter and Instagram, were creating compelling social products that not only challenged Facebook’s dominance but threatened to steal users’ time away from Facebook.

If Facebook was going to be more than a destination for sharing updates with friends and family, it had to move fast. And it did.

Unparalleled Ambition

It’s hard not to respect Facebook for its relentless innovation and lightening fast product updates, as well as its fearlessness in pushing the limits of privacy, user experience  and integration with the web as a whole to achieve its vision.

However, if you look at Facebook’s list of 22 (and growing) products– not to mention the thousands of third-party apps — you begin to wonder if Facebook is overreaching and confusing its members.

Over the last couple of years, consumers have been trending towards products with the opposite approach. Simple, stark, and direct sites and apps that do one thing very, very well. We open Instagram because we want to do one easy thing — share a great picture or see our friends pictures. It’s fun. It’s lightweight. It scratches an itch.

What itch is Facebook scratching? Most people I know can’t clearly articulate why they use Facebook. Now that we’ve reassembled our high school physics class, shared every song we listen to, and uploaded every cat video out there, our feeds (we now have two feeds!) have become cluttered news tickers without any focus or context.

Facebook’s expansions of services and connections don’t come with a backup plan. After Facebook realized that we don’t want to connect with close friends and casual acquaintances in the same way, what did the site do? They added yet another new feature so that we could segment the giant list of friends that they pushed us to assemble in the first place. Meanwhile, the easier option is to just declare Facebook bankruptcy and start over on another social network like Path.

That’s the real irony of Facebook’s recent moves. By copying the startups that threaten them, Facebook actually muddles members’ experience so much that it enhances the need for its competitors.

Here’s an incomplete list of companies Facebook is actively competing with:

• Flickr/Picasa/Instagram (pictures)
• YouTube/Vimeo (video)
• Beluga/GroupMe (group messenger apps)
• Foursquare (location sharing)
• Twitter (activity feed)
• Turntable.fm (shared listening)
• vBulletin (groups)
• News.me/Flipboard (frictionless social news/reading)
• Tumblr/Pinterest/etc (share other people’s pictures)
• AIM/GChat (chat)
• Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail (Facebook Messenger)
• About.me/Flavors.me (Timeline)
• Google+, Path (create rings of friends/acquaintances)
• Plancast (events)
• Craigslist (classified listings)

Many of the hottest startups have easy to use, beautiful and elegant sites built around small but significant problems. Several, including Foursquare, Tumblr, Living Social and Groupon, have had astounding results even in the face of Facebook’s attempts to move into their spaces.

Does Facebook really believe it can implement every solution better than its competitors? Does it think its social graph is so much of an advantage that it can sustain a confused and complicated product?

A lot of VCs ask startups what they’ll do when Facebook copies their features. But come IPO time, maybe Facebook’s shareholders should start asking what happens when Facebook tries to do too much.

Edward Aten is the founder of Swift.fm, a social distribution service for musicians. He’s an active startup advisor, blogger and marathoner in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter @edwardaten. The views expressed here are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of any Company with which he is or has been affiliated.

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Not my face, but several parts of who I am online. My travels looked world class. The concerts I attended were of epic proportions. My everyday walks down the street were notable and even my shopping looked as though I had impeccable taste (though admittedly I don’t).

And it’s all going to look even better in 2012.

Unsurprisingly, the tech community didn’t really seem to notice. Instead, we spent a lot of time this year talking about measuring, quantifying and creating influence. We focused on our reach, response metrics and the algorithms we use to quantify it.

But most normal people aren’t deeply motivated by their Klout scores or the statistical impact of their activities on others. In fact, most of the services we saw explode in 2011 aren’t even measured in your Klout score. Instead, they focused on the other side of the social equation — enhancing the quality of our emotional connections with each other.

Looks Matter

What do I mean? The successful web companies of 2011 and beyond are just simply better looking. I don’t mean that on a surface level regarding their precious gradients and logos. I mean, quite literally, visual experiences are starting to become the gold standard of web success.

Before humans ever wanted to be influential, we wanted to be beautiful. Not just beautiful in just the attractive sense, but we want people to look at us and feel things; desire, intrigue, interest. For hundreds of years we’ve been carefully curating our appearance, clothes, jewelry, cars and houses for visceral impact (and judging others). 2012 will be the year these emotions come online full scale. They will change the way we interact with each other, the way we buy things and change our online experiences.

The first wave of the emotional web caught hold over the last year with services like Instagram, Tumblr and About.me.

It’s easy to feel the personal appeal of a product like Instagram. Though the app is simple, it somehow transforms a phone into a window through which we see the lives of the people we love. This feeling of closeness isn’t purely scientific — but somehow by using filters we don’t see exactly *what* the photographer visually sees (as they would with a raw picture) but *how* they see it.

Said another way, Instagram makes our pictures less accurate, but what we lose in exactness we gain in the ability to create instant nostalgia and show our view of our subjects. At its core, Instagram is a simple tool that doesn’t make us better photographers, but better communicators of feelings and experiences, and thats what matters to people.

What makes Tumblr tick

In similar ways Tumblr has changed the way most of us think about blogs. Not only shifting our expectation from text to images, but the structure, layout and emotional appeal we can create ourselves is dramatically improved. For years blogs with beautiful themes, style and content were relegated to design studios and art institutes — until Tumblr. With a total focus on allowing anyone to easily implement a high-art template, source quality content and share virally (sometimes at the cost of usability, or copyright) it clearly struck a nerve.

About.me placed a bet that people weren’t in need of an online directory of their online presences but a page that reflected their personalities and identities first – and directed them to their other sites second. They figured out that the primary source of our identity is how we look and built the site around a browser-sized image of the user.

Each of these services built on a few key concepts (and ultimately on innate human nature):

• Make it easy for your users to create content they are proud to share. A site that is beautiful and easy to use itself is no longer enough. Sites will be differentiated in their ability to help users’ lives look attractive and interesting. This is important wherever it happens in the process — whether it is beautiful themes for WordPress from WooThemes, images filters in Instagram and Path, or gorgeous blogs on the fly with Tumblr.
• Prioritize the emotions behind the content over the data within. Images in Instagram are but shadows of their actual situations (sometimes literally). Attribution on Tumblr is barely a hat tip (if that). The best sites will leave accuracy and unneeded information behind to allow the users voice (even if it isn’t theirs) to be heard clearly.
• Use your real estate. Each of the services made bold choices to utilize large, impactful content wherever possible. This is true especially when using images or video, filling up all appropriate space in the service of creating something beautiful.
• Dress up your text. About.me and Tumblr do an amazing job of using embedded fonts to enhance their worlds. Typekit (recently acquired by Adobe) is but one pipeline to web beauty.

The Look of Love: 2012 Edition

These services are just the beginning of a revolution that will gain speed in 2012 where all sectors of the net will incorporate their successes.

The existing social titans are already responding. Twitter’s recent redesign integrates media into the core of the site much more closely. The timeline rolled out by Facebook in the past few weeks goes a step further by not only introducing the billboard concept pioneered by Path to its 500M users but auto-creating infographics of users activities.

Business has a lot to learn from these developments as well — and not just from the marketing side.

Social shopping site Svpply is pioneering a visceral online shopping experience that forgoes the common shopping cart metaphor for a tumblr-esque feed of large images. Instead of discerning features and comparing specifications, we browse and react — much like the shopping experience humans have had for the last few thousand years walking through markets – to those products that grip us.

As these concepts gain steam, expect more rich experiences everywhere you touch the web, from travel to heathcare and music to news.

These sorts of concepts simply wouldn’t be possible three or four years ago. The benefit to web and mobile startups today is that now each and every user is outfitted with the tools that can allow for this modified, enhanced beauty: our pockets are buzzing with powerful smartphones with high-quality cameras, video capability, and the processor speeds that can handle the user-side filtering and editing necessary in 2012.

I have a feeling when I look back on 2012 in 365 days, I’ll look even better. Online, at least.

Edward Aten is the founder of Swift.fm, a social music distribution service. You can follow him on Twitter. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Cea.

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