A new age of social networking is coming… to your cell phone. I don’t know when, but I do know it will come. It will start secretly (to you) on high school and college kids’ phones. It will likely involve sharing something that you feel is far too private to be publicly posted all over the place online. It will grow, and you will see it spreading to seemingly every teenager’s phone. Then one day, your Mom will announce that she’s signed up, and you’ll realize that somewhere along the way, this thing really became a new way to communicate.
There are several companies circling this potentially big opportunity, and some have been trying to grab it for awhile. How soon it emerges will depend on several factors, including the speed that mobile networks enable mobile applications to operate more freely and how quickly “rich-interface,” internet-capable phones become widespread. In summary:
Sometime soon, an application will emerge as the next big, technology-driven, social-networking, phenomenon. This time it will be in the mobile realm. Any day now, we will notice people using a mobile application to interact in new ways with their “network of friends and peers.”
I imagine this app allowing us to share pictures of wherever we are in realtime, see friends’ pictures immediately as they are taken, share and find our friends’ locations, meet up as groups, and network with friends of friends… all using our phones.
Reasons I Believe this is Coming
- Everything Shared: Our world keeps getting more public. We like to share everything from status (twitter) to personal web diaries (blogs), to pictures (flickr) and messages (facebook) that can be retrieved for Google-eternity (google
). Sharing locations, friends and realtime meet-up invites are just a natural next step. - Realtime is Now: Getting information that is up to date is all that matters. You don’t know about that link that just got shared on digg? What are you doing? You didn’t see those pictures on facebook? Getting the newest and latest information drives in trendsetters, and trendsetters…. set trends
- Media Is More Fun than Text and Talk: Texting and talking is great, but there are times when getting rich information at your convenience is just easier. This set of applications will automatically update and retrieve your current status, pictures, videos, people connections, and find out what your friends are up to. Nobody wants to be the guy texting at a bar, but taking pictures with a group (of hot girls) so you can show them off to your friends can easily turn into something “cool.”
- Meeting People: On some level, all of these popular social applications have been about meeting and interacting with people. Getting introduced to friends of friends has always existed, it just becomes much more efficient to figure out how you know people when a computer is finding the inter-relationships. Imagine a LinkedIn that was useful!
- Meeting Up: Remember what the world was like before cell phones? How did people know how to find each other? It’s a modern mystery. Calls have given way to texting, but both of these are highly inefficient. Sharing locations and seeing where friends are hanging out will be a natural evolution.
If you are really up on things, you will probably note that not much of what I’ve pointed out here is impossible to do, and much of exists in some form or another right now.
What I think is yet to really emerge is a clearly integrated experience that has a big following. But isn’t Facebook already trying to do some of this? Yes, but here’s what I think of the current landscape:
- There is not a fullblown, fun application out there that is well known (or I just haven’t heard of it)
- Phones with usable browser screens are not widespread enough
- The cellular industry has tried to “corner” the monetization of media on their networks. I think they unintentionally just slowed down the potential of their network. The mobile web is just taking off in the US, despite being very popular in several Asian and European countries. Sharing media is even worse. We are far behind in text and picture sharing. Unless you get a full data plan, it is probably not wise to start sending around a bunch of pictures.
When will this happen?
There are a few things happening that could help out with this.
- gPhone: Google has been playing with the idea of coming out with a phone. Rumors are a more open platform than what exists now, which could lead to many new apps being built the likes of what I listed above.
- Killer Mobile Apps: Apple’s iPhone has set the bar for using the web on a phone. Now someone needs to create a reason that you need to have mobile internet. There are some useful things to have, but no clear killer application. It’s kind of a chicken vs the egg question, but at some point, killer mobile applications will drive all phones to have rich browsers, while at the same time, the lack of killer apps still kind of makes it optional. I think there’s a good chance that the major phone vendors will churn out better looking browsers on phones just to keep up with Apple and Google.
- New Cellular Competition: Both Google and Apple are thinking about purchasing from the 700Mhz Wireless spectrum in an auction of this frequency in January 08. If either of these companies gets control of the airwaves, expect some changes in how you use your mobile phone. Whether or not either is able to completely open up mobile internet so it is more like how you use internet on your laptops (ie, using up bandwidth recklessly) remains to be seen.
- Free Bandwidth: Current cellular plans are not exactly cheap when it comes to data. You essentially pay the same connection price that it costs to send a single internet connection into your house. This could change through several arenas, including some of the WiMax efforts going on, and the entry of Google into the market with their rumored stockpile of fiber optic cable, and their recent announcement of Adsense on Mobile. MORE likely, a college network will be the birthplace of these new apps, and people will really leverage the high, free bandwidth and tech savvy communities all interacting close together.
- Legal Action: The FCC keeps toying with the idea of requiring mobile phone vendors to “open” up their phones and allow anyone to put applications on board. This has been at the pressure of Google, and the counter pressure of the big Telecoms (according to blogs :)). Not a ton of progress has been made, and you have to figure that at some point, Google, Amazon and Ebay vs the old Telecoms has to cause quite a stalemate. I think at some point, the industry will sort itself out through the likes of Google and Apple offering competing products.
So what should I expect out of this “revolutionary” application?
Lots of Pictures
This app will be all about sharing photos of everything you are doing. Out at a bar?, take and post all kinds of pictures.
This is a picture from a new social networking application called CollegeTonight, which is launching by hosting over a hundred parties across the country at colleges.
See What Friends Are Doing
A next-gen mobile networking app will also be all about seeing what your friends are doing. You will get updates of pictures from your friends pre-tagged with venues, and anyone that happens to be around (based on location mashups with your network). Expect to see location-based ads to support the application.
Meet People
One major “new” feature of this application will be to identify and physically meet friends of friends.
See your buddy with his friend you really liked the last time you met her? This lets you know to go find them before the night is out.
Recognize someone at the bar, and know it’s your buddies friend, but can’t remember their name? The app should tell you who in your network of networks is in your same venue.
Imagine this feature at a work location. Pretty big application for meeting people in your industry. Maybe there will be plugins (see platform below) that let you see locations of people at the venue whose blog you’ve read and what it was about. Of course, that comes after considerable critical mass
Integration with Existing Sites
Expect close integration and posting to existing Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, etc accounts. This just means you will be able to leverage your existing friend networks, and upload pictures and status to your existing Facebook wall, etc.
It’s a Platform!
That may not mean anything to you. If it doesn’t, just think of it as a new buzzword. There is an intended meaning though: what it means is that on top of this kind of application, the goal is to create a “platform,” from which other applications can be built.
So if someone comes up with a fun plugin to share restaurant meal pictures and reviews, then anyone in your network can lookup your reviews for the venue you’re in. Maybe a friend of a friend loved the mahi mahi. Expect the “platform” to allow the app to share the venue detection, tie pictures to your location, and find friends of friends. Also expect this to feed right into your regular pictures and updates that your friends see.
Want wine suggestions from your wineo friend? Send him the wine list (remember, this is all about pictures), and get his suggestions. Or maybe the app looks up the wine list and tells you what wines people in your network have liked.
Where are we now?
There are several companies heading towards some of this as we speak.
Brightkite is an interesting new player that is going for the mobile location based application “platform” that will enable them to be the basepoint for a market of applications leveraging that information. According to their blog, they already have the platform and a few of these applications:
1) a location-based chat application that works via SMS, 2) a text-to-screen application (we call it placestreaming) and 3) a small app for Facebook called “Where are you”.
Loopt is another promising looking app that lets you communicate with friends while you look at their locations on maps. It takes this to many of the steps I listed above by letting users post photos, find out who is nearby, share events, and see what friends are up to.
iRovr, shown to the left, is mobile social networking aimed solely at iPhone users. You can post photos, chat, and interact with other iPhone owners and friends.
Zyb is a Danish company that started as a way to upload your phone contacts, calendar and messages, and turned into a way to socialize as well (like photo tagging, getting updated contact info, and sharing content).
Imity and Aka Aki are both trying to find and connect users via bluetooth connections. So you can find people in real life as you go about your regular activities.
Dodgeball (bought by Google) is onto a lot of the right ideas with venues, location sharing, and creating connections between friends of friends. That said, it doesn’t seem to have attracted a huge user base. It may have hit the market too early, and really needs too many people and too much information in place before it becomes valuable. Sort of a critical mass or bust type app. I wonder what the chances you and anyone else who post locations to this thing are ever in the same place are.
Mocospace and Mig33 are two other companies doing pretty standard mobile social networks with photos, videos, chatting and posting status.
Then finally, there’s Facebook and MySpace who will obviously have a large impact on this space if they can get even somewhat usable applications and remain “cool.”
What’s with the title? Imagine if MySpace told you where people were physically…clearly some security will be a required “first feature.”Otherwise, let the stalking begin.Blake
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September 21st, 2007 at 8:55 am
I think you nailed it with Reason #5 - “Meeting Up: Remember what the world was like before cell phones? How did people know how to find each other? It’s a modern mystery. Calls have given way to texting, but both of these are highly inefficient.”
Think mobile google maps + AIM away messages.
In college AIM was usually (for me at least) more efficient then calling/texting (interestingly, my spell checker still thinks “texting” is misspelled) since you didn’t have to wait for a response from the other person. You could instantly know where your friends were on a given night.
None of my friends use AIM anymore, though, so there’s a “need” for an alternative. There’s also the added bonus that you can update your ‘mobile away message’ throughout the night as opposed to your AIM one, which is basically static unless you have an IM client on your phone. This is similar to the “Where you at?” feature for boost mobile, but I think this needs to be driven by an external app - your ‘killer app’ - as opposed to the wireless provider itself, let alone a provider that not one person in my friend base uses.
October 20th, 2007 at 7:32 am
An answer to “remember what the world was like before cell phones?” Since i am probably the only person reading this who actually does remember the world before cell phones, I”ll offer an answer. There was a bit more mystery. You made plans ahead of time instead of on the fly. People had more face to face time. Long distance romances were harder to maintain: all of the long distance talking was paid for by the minute!l At colleges, people posted flyers all over the place. People left messages on actual answering machines, and calls were returned whenever the receiver returned home. People did manage to have an active social life in spite of this lack of networking. With all of that said, would I want to go back? Absolutely not!
October 27th, 2007 at 7:01 am
PS to my earlier answer….people used Pay Phones, now going the way of the dinosaur….college kids relied on the old standby of the dry erase board on your friend’s door……..