AOL Plays to Growing Mobility - Knowing Your Audience
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AOL is hardly the only search engine offering some kind of mobile search service. Both Google and Yahoo! have their own versions. And given some of the numbers from the mobile lifestyle survey mentioned earlier, all three services might end up growing in the future. The survey covered public attitudes about cell phones and was based on telephone interviews with more than 1,500 adults from all fifty states except for Alaska and Hawaii. Nearly 1,300 of those surveyed were cell phone users. The survey was conducted in March 2006.
Some analysts have interpreted the results to show that adults are becoming increasingly dependent on their cell phones. Indeed, 29 percent of those polled said they could not live without their cell phones. Talking about behaviors that are a bit less extreme, more than half of those polled keep their cell phones on all day, every day. Forty percent of those in the 18-29 age group said they were likely to get rid of their landline. As someone who made that leap well over a year ago, I can certainly understand why.
Cell phones aren’t just being used for phone calls anymore. Thirty-five percent of those surveyed said they send SMS text messages to family, friends, and business colleagues. In the 18-29 age group, it was more like a whopping 65 percent. And more than a quarter said they’d like to have desktops IMs from at least some contacts automatically forwarded to their mobile device. Again, the 18-29 age group showed that they loved the technology even more; 50 percent of them wanted IM forwarding of selected contacts.
How about email? While only eight percent of cell phone users access email from their phone, almost a quarter of users said they’d like to be able to do so. Checking email is already something of a portable experience for anyone who has web-based email, so being able to check it from something other than an Internet-connected desktop is really just another step in that direction.
But of course, the questions about usage most likely to interest AOL and the other major search engines involve search. I can’t say I was surprised to hear that more than half of those surveyed either use mobile maps on their cell phone now, or would like to have that service on their next cell phone. Just under a third gave the same answer for mobile search, and a similar number for browsing the Internet. Assuming we can trust the results of the survey, many of AOL’s new features play right into those desires.
Next: But What are They Really Searching For? >>
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