How iPhone 3.0 Changes The World

It's a relatively simple function. Everybody else has had it for years. Customers have screamed at Apple for not having it for the past two years. But, as of Wednesday, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company finally turned it loose: Copy and Paste for the iPhone.

OK, get your laughing or sneering out of the way now. Go ahead. I'll wait. Ok. Finished?

Because Copy and Paste on the iPhone is simply one of the most important advances in that platform since it launched in 2007, and it will have an immediate and significant impact worldwide.

The functionality, added to iPhone 3.0, works as advertised: using the device's touch function, it takes about four touches to copy text from one screen and paste it to another. It's easy, it's smooth. And here's why it's a big deal.

As we enter an era that some are calling the "Link Economy" or economy of "Passed Links" (Jeff Jarvis and Fred Wilson, respectively have used those phrases), the ability to copy, paste and send URLs via text message, email, Twitter, Facebook, or instant message on world's fastest-growing handheld device becomes critical. Now, suddenly, between 10 million and 20 million iPhone users will have this ability - users who never let their iPhone get more than a couple of feet from their bodies at any moment of the day.

Before iPhone 3.0, to share a link from an iPhone to someone else required either simply memorizing the URL, or using one of a few balky third-party applications available, or hoping an information source like USA Today made it possible as a feature in a custom application. Most of the time, bet that iPhone users simply waited until they were at a PC to share a link. Now that's all a thing of the past and sharing data and URLs over the iPhone isn't an issue.

What this means:

- Web analytics engines, many of which have been ill-designed to account for Internet traffic resulting from SMS or smart phone applications, will become even more flummoxed unless developers get cracking and make their software effective at reading it all;

- Google, which has built an empire by aggregating information like news, will face an increasingly rising tide of dis-aggregation from SMS, email, social networks and the like as individuals pass more links as trusted sources to colleagues, friends, acquaintances, and family members in their own individual networks;

- More and more information and transactions will be passed over the Internet by applications other than Web browsers, now that the iPhone platform has made it so simple to do so on its platform.

Business intelligence applications will need to deal with this. Data centers will need to deal with this. Businesses will need to deal with this. With Copy and Paste for iPhone now live, exchange of information and links on non-PC devices will simply change use models and the way things are done.

You can follow Ed Moltzen on Twitter, and send him links from your iPhone, here: @emoltzen

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