Mobile Social Networks, are we there yet?
Mobile is hot these days, with a lot of investment going into it and so are social networks (myspace, youtube ...). Now lets focus on the niche when we merge these 2 concepts, i.e., mobile social networks ... is the picture still as rosy?
We have been through some of that with our product LinknSurf, and there are a lot of observations that we have made ... my understanding is that it will still be sometime before mobile social networks are ready, the infrastructure is still not there yet.
For a social network to be successful, you need to get together people of similar interests and allow them to communicate over their common interests. Talking about communication on the mobile phone, lets see what we have today:
- Voice: A voice based social network, hmmm ... somehow that is hard to imagine, or is it just my imagination ;-)
- SMS: SMS based social networks would come with their own limitations - 160 chars, always alerting behavior, cost involved on a per SMS basis ...
- Mobile web: Now this could be close if mobile sites were more usable, there weren't latency issues with accessing those and if everyone with a mobile phone had GPRS. The reality is that mobile web is still not there yet.
- A mobile app like j2me, symbian: This is better than mobile sites because of the usability that it offers, however, there are still 2 factors that would prevent this - varied devices not all of them could support a feature rich app and most people with mobile phones don't have GPRS.
There are a bunch of mobile social networking apps like Rabble, fotochatter, litefeeds etc. but the userbase growth has been limited ... the key issue being ... if I as a user want to connect to a user with whom I share a common interest what is likelyhood of that person having
- GPRS access ?
- A supported handset ?
So the millon dollar question is, how could we make a social network on mobile phones successful, any answers?
We have been through some of that with our product LinknSurf, and there are a lot of observations that we have made ... my understanding is that it will still be sometime before mobile social networks are ready, the infrastructure is still not there yet.
For a social network to be successful, you need to get together people of similar interests and allow them to communicate over their common interests. Talking about communication on the mobile phone, lets see what we have today:
- Voice: A voice based social network, hmmm ... somehow that is hard to imagine, or is it just my imagination ;-)
- SMS: SMS based social networks would come with their own limitations - 160 chars, always alerting behavior, cost involved on a per SMS basis ...
- Mobile web: Now this could be close if mobile sites were more usable, there weren't latency issues with accessing those and if everyone with a mobile phone had GPRS. The reality is that mobile web is still not there yet.
- A mobile app like j2me, symbian: This is better than mobile sites because of the usability that it offers, however, there are still 2 factors that would prevent this - varied devices not all of them could support a feature rich app and most people with mobile phones don't have GPRS.
There are a bunch of mobile social networking apps like Rabble, fotochatter, litefeeds etc. but the userbase growth has been limited ... the key issue being ... if I as a user want to connect to a user with whom I share a common interest what is likelyhood of that person having
- GPRS access ?
- A supported handset ?
So the millon dollar question is, how could we make a social network on mobile phones successful, any answers?
Labels: mobile, socialnetwork
posted by Varun Khurana at 3:04 PM
1 Comments:
Same was true when internet/mobile phones were new in India. See now, people are hooked to their devices and internet. An idea can be to merge mobile networks with internet networks...same contents..same interests..same topics..Question is : is that what users are asking for...
Post a Comment
<< Home