Opinions in Mobile - What is the future of mobile social networking?
Opinions in Mobile December 7th, 2008As last week was a lot about social networking and mobile social networking in the media - today we ask our Opinion Leaders about what they think the future of mobile social networking is. There were already many interesting responses. See this link for more of them.
Russell Buckley’s answer:
Most of the big successes so far on the mobile web have been down to social networking. This is true whether you take the mobile specialists, such as Itsmy and Peperonity, to the web incumbents such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace.
I’d say
- Accessing social networks with a mobile will be bigger than via PC within two years
- Overall, they’ll become less important as a percentage of mobile web traffic, as other types of mobile website get discovered and used
- Look out for a huge growth and therefore influence from emerging markets. Already Indonesia, South Africa and The Philippines are huge markets
- Advertising will emerge as the primary (but not the only) revenue driver.
Vassili le Moigne’s answer:
I think that mobile social networks, as long as they operate in isolation of a bigger PC based service/network, are bound to go bankruped because
a) they will lack critical mass for the foreseable future (unless they use SMS as an update mechanism vs. Smartphones over IP, they only address a niche of the social networking market) &
b) the business model is even more shaky/elusive that on the PC based social networking.
c) They will face competition from better integrated services with a mobile platform (Google, Live)For the PC based social network, mobile is just another (potentially high traffic/low quality generating) conduit from/to the users. But it will remain just that, a tool. And mobile won’t help solve the revenue geneation issue. So, ask me again in 2 years and we’ll see how dramatically different the field will have become.
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December 25th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Location Based Social Networking (LBSN) applications will become a key driver for growing the location-based services market and therefore the mobile market too. The fact is that the accessibility of technology creates communities and services, and the commoditization of GPS enabled phones will accelerate the process.
But we need to remember that the key of the social networks is interaction, and mobile interaction = money. So my first question is who is going to pay the bill? I addressed this issue in a series of post regarding Location Based Social Networking business models in my BLOG http://www.BDNooz.com
In my BLOG I put together a list of more than 50 LBSN companies. My first impression is that many of the LBSN today are “me too” applications, and at this point I can’t pinpoint one that present a marketing message with a unique offer, a distinctive value proposition or main differentiators from the others. What drives us to the ultimate question: “What is the real value for the end user?” I doubt anybody can base a business model on the hope the Facebook / MySpace “exhibitionistic” generation is ready to buy “stalk/being stalked” as a main added value.