Missing Social Opportunities

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ballpark-envi/id318129329?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D6

The above is a link to a baseball lover's app. Ballpark Envi brings Major League Ballpark images to your iPhone or iPod Touch complete past and present parks and information about each. So, for $0.99, you can buy a really bad book on Major League Ball Parks. It's apps like this that miss the social potential of the iPhone. Just to be clear, social capital is invalualbe in today's information driven economy.

Let's go through a user scenario: Imagine you want to buy tickets quickly. The Yankee's are coming in town and Cliff Lee is pitching. You learned this while sitting at your surfing your iPhone while your boss was talking about his daughter's recital somewhere in between the red and your pension. But you want to see the game from just anywhere. You wanna be in the seats where you can feel the wind from Yankee bats as the make increasing feeble attempts to hit the ball. You want to see the dugout so you can watch the Yankees wait for Lee to tire. So, you open your Stadium App. Click on your hometown team. And click in the section you want to sit in. Up pops reviews from fans who sat in those seats, organized by row. A lot of good reviews for the first base line. You click on "view" to see a picture of the stadiums from those seats. You like what you see so, you select seats there. You click on "buy the tickets." In 10 minutes, the weekend begins, and you have tickets to the biggest game your team will have in a month.

If you want more suggestions than the posted reviews, the app can run twitter. The stream consists post about people's experience in that particular stadium. So, say you want to travel with your team. You can follow the feed of that home team's stadium to see what people are saying. For information, you can always send the message via Twitter or through the Facebook Connect feature on the app.

Now, doesn't that sound more useful.