Golding, Jaokar and Cushman thinking of evolution of mobile social networking

Three of the big thinkers in the mobile space who all have very strong focuses in specifically mobile communities and social networking, are our friends Paul Golding, Ajit Jaokar and David Cushman. Each of the three are active bloggers and regularly contribute at Forum Oxford (where Ajit is co-moderator with me). I read their writing always with interest. Over the past few days all three have written a major piece examining how the "Mobile Web 2.0" or "Mobile Social Networking" or "Mobile Communities" will be evolving.

Paul Golding (author of Next Generation Wireless Applications) wrote about a new paradigm for developing mobile social networking services, in his thought-provoking long and deep article about mobile application design at his blog entitled Architectural Challenges for Mobile 2.0. Paul explores for example the potential of using the address book. Paul writes,

"Instead of people being represented by passive records in an address book (or in a SIM card), they become active objects in our extended browser container. Now, whenever any Web or SIP event happens on my device that can be related to a person, I can modify my set of person-objects accordingly and trigger a browser-based mash-up to play out, whatever that might be."

The article has much more than just that, including SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), and IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) and the impacts of Android etc. A great read for anyone thinking about the design of phones and applications for mobile and in particular social networking on mobile phones.

Then Ajit Jaokar (author of several books, his latest is Mobile Web 2.0) wrote of his thoughts from the big mobile telecoms industry event in Barcelona, where he was presenting. He is looking at the customer in the "mobile communities" space, and the role of mobile phones within that "user-generated content" context. Ajit makes some perhaps counter-intuitive observations, against a "universal trend to mobile", that might even surprise some of his readers as Ajit is a well known "mobilist." But Ajit's position is very well argued and I find very much agreement in his thesis. That regardless of how young users - what we like to call Generation C, the Community Generation - consume content (on mobile or internet or elsewhere), their preferred methods of content-creation is the most open of systems, and that is clearly the internet today. Ajit writes on his blog (and Forum Oxford) in his very provocatively entilted "Mobile Youth is a Myth", but he makes very good points, including:

All your friends are not on the same Operator – you don’t live your life like that! Since mobile services are not interoperable(excluding voice and SMS) – they do not reflect the social graph. The same applies to user generated content. UGC needs interoperable systems and that’s why the youth gravitate to facebook. Brad Fitzpatrick of facebook defines "social graph" as "The global mapping of everybody and how they're related". The key is: How closely is the youth's real life social graph mirrored to their online graph (Internet and Mobile). That’s where facebook wins and 'Mobile' loses in winning the hearts and minds of the young. However, when the social graph is mirrored on mobile devices .. We get some very interesting services ..

Very good thinking Ajit..

So then we have David Cushman (sorry, no book yet from David, but I would not be surprised to see him come up with one ha-ha), the digital evangelist at UK based giant print publisher Emap. David writes about EyeVibe (a very interesting service, by the way) and argues that future (mobile) social networking services need to be inter-operable. EyeVibe does just that for two of the most famous mobile video sharing sites, that both pay video content creators a revenue-share every time their videos are viewed. The two are SeeMeTV on the Three UK network (owned by Hutchison of Hong Kong) and LookAtMe which is a very similar service on O2 UK (owned by Telefonica of Spain). David writes on his blog (and also at Forum Oxford) in his entry entitled EyeVibe Tears Down The Walls,

Tearing down those walls is important for all sorts of reasons. As I've posted previously: "...open will always beat closed. So here's another reason: the value of random friends. "You'll have heard of small world theory, or six-degrees of separation. The reason these are possible is because random friends are introduced to networks - people outside of your usual experience. For example, someone you meet on holiday, or at a party - who opens up a whole series of new connections for you. "These do not happen when you are in jail... "Random friends are the parts of your network which allow its value to grow exponentially (see Reed's Law). Remove them and your network has considerably less value." Now any UK mobile subscriber with a video-enabled handset can share and earn cash from their mobile video clips in one community, no matter which operator they are with. For the first time members can invite ALL their friends to be part of the same community.

Yes, great point David. I also personally like David's term "value of random friends". That really does coin into a nutshell the extra benefit we find in Reed's Law beyond Metcalfe's Law.

We reported at this blog last year that total revenues of social networking services on mobile networks at 5.05 B dollars in 2007 are already far greater than revenues on internet social networking services. Just about every internet online social networking service has issued some statements of their intentions to enter the mobile space if they are not there already. But again, mobile is a new media (the 7th Mass Media as we say) and copying what happened before is not enough. We have to use the true power of mobile, understand what makes social interaction on fixed internet services so compelling - in particular open networks - and evolve our services into that direction.

Comments

[David Cushman]

Hi Tomi, thanks for your very kind words.
Just for the sake of accuracy I should point out that emap consumer media is now Bauer Consumer Media - so that's the firm I am now Digital Development Director at - still in the UK. A Nameplate change only.

[Alan Moore]

Great Post Tomi!

Your friend

Alan :-)

[Tomi Ahonen]

Hi David and Alan

Bauer? When did this happen (ya-ya, I'm sure it's been all over the news in Britain ha-ha.. ) but Bauer? That sounds odd, not very British as a name, sounds more German..

Happy you're still doing the same stuff over there at Bauer..

Thanks Alan :-)

Tomi :-)

[David Cushman]

Yep Bauer is German. It's a privately owned company.
More here: http://www.bauer.co.uk/bauer_press

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