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What does the future hold for mobile social networks?

By Hope Needles

I am intrigued by the idea of mobile social networks, but I have my doubts about whether they will ever truly be able to catch on with mainstream users.

Unlike Internet-based services, mobile social networks face hardware compatibility issues and GPS limitations that must be overcome if they ever hope to model the success of Myspace, Facebook or Bebo. Here is a quick glance at some of the mobile networks that have caught my eye, and some of the strengths and weaknesses that could either help or prevent them from growing.

Brightkite

As a location-based social-networking service, Brightkite may be one of the most promising mobile networks available right now. Brightkite allows anyone to sign up and connect with their mobile network of friends, based on each person’s physical location at a given moment. The fact that Brightkite doesn’t require GPS (users send updates to the service via text messaging, pictures and emails) may make it more appealing for casual users who are intimidated by GPS.

However, like most mobile social networks that are still in development stages, there are compatibility issues that need to be addressed. Users with high-end, feature-filled phones will have a much richer experience using Brightkite than consumers with more affordable, simpler devices. The main challenge for developers, then, is creating a service that can easily reach and connect with the mainstream mobile market, regardless of how technologically advanced each consumer and his or her mobile device may be. With over 3.3 billion cell phone subscribers worldwide, well exceeding the number of Internet surfers, I think we are still a long way off from finding an application that can resolve these compatibility issues and still actively engage all types of people.

Zyb
Unlike Brightkite, Zyb serves as more of a personal organizer for a mobile network of contacts. By providing a backup and online synchronization function for all of your personal data, it enhances the experience of using a mobile addressbook to store contact information. Zyb helps you centralize all of your phone numbers, appointments and texts, which you can then access or manage online, and on your mobile device. All of this information can also be easily be transferred to a new phone if need be. In addition, Zyb can be used a tool for finding out who has added you to their mobile friends network.

While I think that Zyb is an interesting application that may eventually catch on faster than Brightkite, I still think that it is very limited in what it can do. For now it serves as a nice complement to Facebook photo albums, SMS texting and mobile calendars, but until it can offer me something that I can’t find anywhere else, it risks being replaced by a more robust technology.

Groovr

Groovr strikes me as being a great service for documenting aspects of your daily life, including parties, events and road trips. On Groovr, you can set up a personal profile for posting pictures, text messages or video to then send to all of your mobile friends. While it is useful to have this function in a mobile social network, it seems rather redundant. Why would someone need to go to the trouble of setting up a profile to post messages and pictures, when this same information can be instantly delivered to a group of people via the text feature? One of the more appealing features of Groovr is its instant chat capability.

A more distinctive feature of Groovr can be seen on its city ‘Explore‘ page. This page lets you post items that are unique to your city, such as photos taken at a specific monument, and share them with other people in that same general area. This gives users the opportunity to view how others are documenting their own unique experiences in the same surroundings.

Again, while I think that this is an interesting feature, Groovr, like other mobile social networks, is still plagued by compatibility issues. Not all phones support these features, such as the Explore page, which makes it difficult for the company penetrate the mainstream mobile market. Until Groovr serves as more than just an extension of online tools that already exist (via Twitter and Flickr), it may have a hard time surviving into the future.

While there may be a day when all of these hardware and network issues are addressed, allowing for greater innovation on mobile devices, PC-based services like Facebook continue to dominate the social networking arena.

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 Filed under Mobile technology |