Old Dog, New Tricks

In an effort to maintain their edge in the market, the strongest players seem to have begun diversifying their offerings across multiple types of services.

• Google has announced it's Google+ social networking platform (supposedly the linchpin to bring all of their many other services to a more "social" atmosphere), Google Instant (a "faster" way to search, that's already spawned indirect backlash from people arguing that it's not the point of the internet to ONLY bring you what you were looking for, and that this method could potentially stifle creation and learning- see the NYTimes article on the EchoChamber). 
• They've also recently (very quietly) introduced Pool Party, which is a free photo sharing application that is optimized for both Androids and iPhones. Although it's only available trough an invitation only basis (seriously?! why do you do this to me Google?), Pool party lets users create group albums and see friend's albums in real time. Pool Party is the brainchild of Slide, a social media start-up that was recently acquired by Google for $182M
• As an additional note to the social networking spin, Facebook promised that they would "launch something awesome" the week of July 4th...uh...thanks Mark Z for still proving that you are a young person like me? Speculation claims that it will most likely be a mobile photo sharing application...like...Google's..and Instagram...and Path.....right.
• Apple has introduced it's cloud music offering, as has Google and Amazon (Amazon also couples this cloud music offering with cloud storage for an additional fee)
• Additionally, Apple is negotiating to have unlimited iTunes downloads across their iOS devices, signaling that maybe they're giving up just a little bit of the big-brother-ness to give their customers a better experience
• Google, trying to compete with the popularity of Apple and the new storage capabilities of Amazon, announced its "Music Beta by Google" recently. However, all reporting seems to indicate that Google unfortunately fell short on this one- the initial proposal of having a giant centralized jukebox (think Grooveshark) did not exist, and no storage is offered. The existing streaming capabilities they do offer also come with a long uploading process. All seem to agree though that many of the shortfalls of this new service can probably be traced back to the difficulties with trying to sign contracts with music labels (they think they're protecting their music content)
  
• Couponing still continues to be big business, especially as the digital wallets from Visa, Google and just about everyone else continue to make the news
• FourSquare and Groupon are currently in talks to team up on mobile deals, most likely to bring additional value to the already-existing Groupon-Now functionality (allows users to find deals that are time specific in their immediate area. This functionality allows merchants to target prime "down times" and encourage more customers while Groupon gets more opportunities to sell more groupons. Customers still get discounts and the added convenience of being able to do "on the spot" things- everyone wins!
• And even regular retailers are jumping on the bandwagon, and making significant investments to make sure that their products are seen by the affluent clan that typically use mobile services
• Zappos, for example, recently announced that they have a brand new mobile strategy that they are anxious to move forward with, which includes integrating social networking/mobile strategies to encourage a more personalized experience during mCommerce

All of these movements seem interesting because, as usual, most of the news is around several major players (Amazon, Google, Apple) but also because it seems like their push for a customer-centric strategy seems to be leaking to other companies as well (retail, Groupons, etc.). Combine this spreading of strategy with the channel-of-the-moment (mobile) and it seems to offer a very compelling argument.