True mobile social networking will be something as yet unseen
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Social communities including MySpace and Bebo have announced plans to offer users ways to interact with their social networks on their mobile phones. In fact, there's a growing awareness generally that the mobilisation of community sites on the web is a key driver for many of the stakeholders in the industry.
But the different players have very different agendas, and how this plays out will be determined as much by competing economic interests as by user demand. To understand what may unfold over the next year, it's important to remember that the US and European markets have developed in different ways, and what one can do in each market has become different as well.
The key difference between the US and the UK, for example, is that in the US the mobile operators have effectively commoditised SMS messaging by creating such large bundles of messages that many if not most users no longer pay attention to the cost of a single message. This means that people are building interactivity systems on top of the SMS structure, essentially using SMS messages as a convenient way to carry information to the web and back. Of course, this doesn't work in the UK, where mobile operators have aggressively defended their data revenues (for which read SMS) and haven't adopted such a commoditisation policy.
Of course, the other ringing difference is that data connection tariffs in the UK are still priced by the megabyte, with the notable exception of 3's new X-series. So all of these attempts to link users' mobiles and their favourite social networks will cost users a great deal of money in data charges.
Regardless of the obstacles and not even considering the issues of getting applications onto the handsets, the drive is on to mobilise social networks. The question that I find interesting is whether this is the next big thing and, if so, what the next next-big-thing will be. In other words, what will the vast community of mobile users want when they begin to understand that their mobile phone can be the hub of an untethered social community and network?
It's possible that this isn't about the web at all. All innovations pay homage to their provenance. New things frequently happen with reference to their origin. Cars were initially thought of as horseless carriages; TV was radio with pictures. But after a certain point, people become comfortable with the new paradigm and begin to deliver services and entertainment designed uniquely for the new device.
So too, I don't think that mobilising web social networks is the same thing as mobile social networks. I think that we'll begin to see new and unique social networks that don't refer to the web at all. They will be designed to take specific advantage of the nature of mobiles and, conversely, will be designed with mobile constraints in mind. So as interesting as MySpace on my mobile may be, I'm far more interested in the native mobile social networks that will follow, that haven't even been invented yet.
There's currently a battle taking place to be the first to take a social network mobile. However, there's no guarantee that these pioneers will be offering what customers want or even that they'll be around in the long term. I suspect we'll see a very different landscape in the near future, with innovative ideas and applications far beyond simply mobilising web social networks.
Doug Richard is chairman and founder of Library House and Hotxt, and recently appeared in the second series of BBC2's Dragons' Den; libraryhouse.net hotxt.co.uk
