Mobile search conference recap

January 18th, 2008

I presented yesterday at this conference on Mobile Social Networks and how i thought things might progress this year. I only had 40 minutes (including questions!) and i know sometimes i can get carried away and run out of time…. So for those of you who were there and even if you weren’t here’s a short recap on what i wanted to get across:

Why Mobile Social?

With the iPhone, WiFi and 3G on handsets, mobile browsing is becoming a more engaging experience, moving away from walled gardens and into our regular browser applications. Mobile social applications allow for easy portability, instant content generation and a genuine ability to become really social (meeting face-to-face? Shock horror!) with location based services.

Facebook still leads the way with an easy mobile experience to allow slick crossover from your computer and have a great interface for the iPhone. Myspace and Bebo are way behind with MySpace mobile being an awful experience and reminds me of playing on the Spectrum ZX81; great in the old days but now massively outdated and unbelievably slow to load. Bebo are still beta testing…….

Consolidation

There are far too many social networks and applications to keep up with, updating facebook/myspace/bebo/twitter/flickr/youtube etc etc so what i think we will see this year are more and more piggy-back applications that allow consolidation (just like those loan ads) into one easy monthly payment application. Check out Fring which is a great mobile service offering free VOIP calling across all your messenger services. You can already see this happening successfully online with a browser i’ve been using called Flock which integrates my facebook/flickr/youtube/twitter and media all into my browser window

Content

Instant content generation and consumption is something we all seem to want whether good or bad (i’m thinking Big Brother) and mobile video and cameras are all continuing this with easy to use upload platforms being provided by youtube, flickr and facebook. Yeah yeah that’s all fine but that’s not really using mobile effectively.

Instead take a look at two new things from Yahoo! labs - Zonetag and Zurfer. I like these! With zonetag you take a picture on you’re phone and when you upload the image it suggests relevant tags based on your location and the phone you’re using etc. Then if you’re out and about, zurfer allows you to view photos on your mobile taken by other users based on your location and places of interest around that area, such as restaurants, museums etc. Also take a look at Qik (courtesy of the legend that is Jackie Danicki) which is taking off in a big way in the US right now. Qik allows you to stream live video from your phone to the web. Sweet!

Applications

Current options for mainstream social network application dev are either for the iPhone, facebook (FBML) or Opensocial. For mobile i’ve watched the rapid takeup of app development for the iPhone with everything from games to weather to recipes. Most come out reasonably well and others i think are completely useless! The dev guidelines are over on apples site.

I think that’s the topline but i’m sure i talked for longer than that…..

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Entry Filed under: mobile, conference speaker, facebook