Social Networking on Mobiles

A recent article came out in the New York Times about the emergence of Mobile Social Networking. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/technology/30social.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin. Venture capitalists are funding sites like Twitter and Jaiku, which allow users to broadcast SMS messages to their friends who are subscribed to their feeds (or to anyone in particular), or Kyte TV, which uses the camera phone and transforms its subscribers into roving camera men/women and citizen journalists. Radar.net functions in a similar way, but limits viewing to self-identified subscribers, eschewing the exhibisionism rampant in other social networking sites. Google-owned Dodgeball uses GPS tracking to identify nearby friends, friends of friends and romantic "crushes", who one could then send text messages to.

Unlike their online equivalents, such as MySpace, which is limited to a special MySpace application available to Cingular and Helio customers through exclusivity agreements, these specialized mobile social networking sites seem only constrained by the handset types (which, when particular classes of supported phones are taken together, should hopefully be larger than any one carrier's subscriber base)

Currently, Cingular leads the pack by hosting two popular online social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook) and two mobile social networking sites that are not yet on-deck (Rabble and CoolTalk). Carriers make money by charging a subscription price for access.

As usual, everyone is proceeding with the basic strategy: make it free, spread the word, try to achieve network effects as quickly as possible to grow active users, and worry about monetization once (hopefully) we have enough people. If MySpace could do it, why not these sites, believers advocate.

VCs emphasize that today's young consumers want to remain in constant contact with their friends at all times. Of course, it does pay to be selective about who you broadcast your messages to; I'm reminded of too many non-personal email journal entries that are pushed into people's accounts unsolicited and end up perpetually stuck in your unread inbox list. This sort of technology could theoretically make this behavior more pervasive. Fortunately, SMS messages tend towards shorter updates, so they may not be perceived as too intrusive. However, one still wonders if we are straying too much towards information overload.

It's too early to determine how the competition in the popular online social networking industry will shake out -- it is likely that there will be a few dominant "generic" players like MySpace and Facebook, and an innumerable number of specialized, niche communities tailored to special interest groups and hobbyists. Already, a host of content solutions such as Video Egg (Video sharing for online communities) are being provided for these online communities. It is possible that the popular sites online will translate to the popular sites on mobile -- but right now, many of the new mobile community sites offer services that are somewhat distinct from their online counterparts moving to mobile.

If numerous mobile social networks evolve around special interest and hobbies as well, the future portends well for social networking solutions providers such as AirG (http://www.airg.com/)

An interesting phenomenon that is happening on Twitter's site is that its solution is used by political candidates on the campaign trail -- the Barak Obama and John Edwards' campaigns post messages to notify subscribers about their campaign trail activities in real-time -- and events -- the Web Expo, for instance, has set up so that attendees could post live SMS messages as they attend various events and workshops throughout the day. Having been in conferences where I wished I could have been in more than one place at a given point in time, now we have the capability to find out in real-time that the session we forewent is going horribly.

I think, in order to succeed, these mobile social networks need to provide these types of relevant scenarios, particularly in these early years when networks and handsets may still be inadequate for widespread mobile video, typing is difficult, dedicated applications are not availble or mobile browser-based portals are not well designed.