Cat-Painting A Mobile Social Future

INSIDE THE MARKETERS STUDIO — "I'm going to write my next column on Cat Paint," I told my wife. She asked, "Is it about how you've become a twelve-year-old girl?" Perhaps. But in a season of social media breakthroughs and brouhahas -- Facebook Connect surpassing 60 million active users, Google and Yahoo rolling out real-time search, Facebook's privacy overhaul, Twitter's Citysearch partnership -- I think we're all going to look back at this time and realize what mattered most was Cat Paint. You might have missed the big news of Cat Paint releasing and then upgrading its iPhone app. After all, Compete says Catpaint.info attracted fewer than 1,500 unique visitors in November. To offer full disclosure, I have no personal connection to Cat Paint, they have never even recognized my existence (outside of posting one of my submissions in their gallery), and I'm more of a dog person. Yet, when they updated their iPhone app, they offered catnip for those who want to understand what the future of mobile social media looks like...