I’m going to be blogging a lot about stuff related to technology, social media and the internet. Today, I’ll start off talking a little about social media and technology. Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are the 3 services I use. I don’t think social media services would have exploded in popularity without smartphones becoming so popular.

Smartphones used to be the domain of business users only. Blackberry, while popular, wasn’t very consumer friendly with it’s clunky interface. Microsoft was attempting to make inroads, but their choice to cram a desktop OS into a phone made Windows Mobile virtually unusable. Palm, the pioneer of PDA’s, hadn’t updated their Treo OS in years, and it’s age was showing.

Then came the iPhone. It changed everything. Suddenly, accessing the internet on a mobile phone was fun and easy. The iPhone’s OS was elegant and easy to master. Afterwards, a slew of copycats and so-called “iPhone Killers” were released. Google eventually entered the fray with their Android mobile OS.

These newer phones gave smartphones more mass appeal, and developers eagerly created applications for the mobile devices. This made it easy for people to connect via Facebook or Twitter wherever they happened to be. Those services have since seen exponential growth. I don’t think we would have seen that without recent technological innovation.