I just had a fascinating meeting with Christian Lindholm, the Nokia usability guru who is now director of multimedia applications for the company. He was giving me a sneak preview of the Lifeblog Multimedia Diary, a blogging application developed by Nokia that's going to be unveiled next week at the Cebit show in Germany.
Lifeblog is a very interesting app: one that pulls multimedia messages, SMS messages, annotations and video files off your Nokia Series 60 mobi, and creates a digital diary, arranged in chronological order. It's a bit like iPhoto for mobile phones (although, ironically, it will appear only for Windows PCs in its first incarnation). You can search through the application on your PC, and deposit favourite messages back on the mobile, all through a very slick interface that works horizontally (rather than vertically like this weblog) and without hierarchy. Lifeblog will work with a range of Series 60 phones yet to be launched (they arrive this summer).
A disappointment is that the app does not publish to the web. At least, yet. The third bit of news from our chat, apart from v1.0 of Lifeblog, and the phones, is that Nokia has been experimenting with Typepad, the weblogging app. There's nothing going to happen between Nokia and Six Apart just yet, it seems, but Lindholm has a Typepad weblog and is experimenting away. He sees publishing your memories as being very important, and I suspect Typepad is the best bet to do that - unless Nokia decides to do its own thing.
Blogging, finally, for the mainstream? This could get very interesting indeed - and yet the mobile networks may not like it one little bit, I suspect. More on that - plus a screenshot - in Thursday's Online.
