Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

I for one would really not like people to know where I was in advance of calling me.

If this feature was available in any social site I would want it to default to off with the ability to turn it on per friend.

While the technology is fascinating, and many techie types will love these kinds of features for what they are, how many Joe Soaps (and by this I mean also business people who are not in the tech area) want to broadcast information like location rather than communicate it selectively…?

In general, I find enthusiasm for web2.0ish type stuff can lead to people losing site of the difference between publishing and communication.

Not all information is suitable for general publication, some things still need to remain between individuals.

For me, location is one of those things.

We see a whole emerging category of mobile social networks, which get very little blog/press coverage, but have surprisingly large numbers of registered users (sometimes in the millions).    Good sites include Moblr, Mobango, Mig33 (strange they all begin with an ‘M’!) and these all render well on my N95.   Not many of them render well (yet) on the iPhone.  

@Frank - that’s a very good point. In fact, it’s something that was highlighted to me by a guy I know from Google. He suggested that such an application should allow you to group users. You may want your friends to know where you are, but not your work colleagues.

@Steve - what’s your favourite one. What’s the one feature you’d like to have to encourage you (or possible others) to use it?

Hi Paul,

I’m using a HTC Universal with a cooked WM6.1 ROM (probably shouldn’t admit to that last part, but what the hey). Having found this post via Twitter, that’s probably the only social network I use out and about.

I use Plaxo, Goosync, RTMsync to keep my mobile & social lives connected but you point out, on the screen real estate available, it’s about functional utility, and Twitter has that (I use m.twitter.com rather than sms’ing). I also tend to use wifi more than 3G but then we’re blessed in Bristol with StreetNet.

I haven’t tried the LinkedIn mobile version but the friend of a friend feature would be very handy when discussing ideas and needing to call on wider connections than might be in my direct network.

An indication of presence would be cool, so you would know whose about to ask for immediate conversations. Location is less relevant and potentially tricky to manage from a granularity perspective (unless you have a zoom feature - who’s in the same block, district, city, county, etc).

John

@John what if the social network was based on location based cell id via Google maps?

That might work, especially if you could punch up a GMap with the current zone of proximity, adjacent zones and your friends that are in each zone.

Assuming they’d given their permission to have their location shared, as per Frank’s point above.

So you guys are interested in the (mobile) services that will come out of Yahoo!’s FireEagle http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ ?

I don’t know of any that exist yet, but I’m interested too.

@Phil - I haven’t seen it, although I’ve heard about it obviously. Isn’t this the site that TechCrunch was giving out invites for?

I don’t know, I don’t read TechCrunch!

I think FireEagle is interesting as it isn’t a service itself, rather, it’s a two way API. It is the services that will be built on top of FireEagle that will make it. Those are the ones that I guess you are looking out for here, where you can control who sees where you are, when you want them to, etc.

Once developers start to leverage the information from FireEagle, then we will see some interesting mobile, location based services and that is what I think you are looking for from a mobile social network, I certainly am!

Answer 1) I use an iPhone and I quite like Google mobile site, although far from perfect. Facebook is not a bad attempt either, but Facebook itself I find much too diverse for my social networking (work-related) needs - and why can I only use parts of the service on mobile? Likewise for Linkedin. I get the feeling these web apps are still ‘dipping their toes in the water’ regarding mobile sites, they don’t seem fully committed. At least I hope that’s the case, if this is their best efforts I’m worried.

Answer 2) Speed! If the networking service is too slow it won’t matter how wonderful the features are. If it is super fast then I can jump through several features easily and will use them all. Other than that I can’t think of just one standout feature that would move me to use a service. It might be generally staying connected continuously and with ease, but a good mobile Twitter app will do that.
I would need:
Contacts
Messaging
Location/status awareness
Maybe someting like the Zagat (US) service for local social features (place to eat/drink/wi-fi/travel etc. I don’t think there are any good UK versions of these, maybe the Yahoo Go service? Doesn’t work on iPhone though and I see they have removed all iPhone references form the Go website.

A good simplified UI will help with speed too.

I think one of the biggest problems is that everything is downloaded through the browser, all the data and all the interface elements. My preference would be for a locally installed app that has fast and robust traffic with my data, like an IM app - only the small raw data packets get transferred. Mobile apps need to be lightening fast and even with some of the ‘mobile’ optimised sites there is a lot of unecessary eye-candy, or worse, eye-candy you have to fetch over the network connection.
You are right Paul, info such as ‘where you are’ should be a given on a mobile networking app.

Heh, when you are mobile ‘Context’ is king

I use Twitter (itweet.net on iPhone delivers the same functionality regardless of access device.)

On a mobile I only need the conversation to keep me interested , I don’t have a need to throw a cow at somebody yet

Optional location base "Allow people know where I am" would be a nice handy feature

Totally randomly… you’ve been pinged by 8 Random Things!

What doesn’t the world know about you…

http://blog.offbeatmammal.com/post/2008/03/8-random-things-about-me.aspx

A bit late, but some answers:

1. Use an iPhone and N95. Apps used is the facebook mobile view, found that the iPhone version is much better, I only ever used it for reference on the go for events and messages. Twitter I use a lot to view messages and put up things. That would be it for the social aspects.

2. I would love to see mobile specific functions, most social networks have been made with a web user and then porting that functionality to the mobile.
- So things like, pinging up position in town when on the move, so friends can look it up (Which pub your in or event your at) or Mobile specific conversations, so maybe a categorised twitter type service, so at football games, events, people can converse through the network.

@Offbeatmammal 8? Ya greedy git! Will get onto it.

@Kalv - I agree totally.

Sorry to say, I’m not in the target demographic for these communities (if only I was younger ).   Which is the favorite mobile social network as voted by users?    We’ve recently completed some buzz research which shows the following ranking: 1.  Peperonity   1.2m mentions  2. Mig33 780k mentions   3.  Tipped  472k mentions   4.   Mobango   472k mentions.    Remember, this measures the amount of buzz that’s out there, not the number of unique users.    You would expect the number of unique users to be correlated with the amount of buzz, but not in a perfect way.

it is great that mobile social networking site are in loop ! The coolest site i use is http://www.t9space.com which combines all the sites in one location. You all have more than one profile so it is better to keep a bookmark for the same purpose 

@Steve sorry for taking so long to reply - completely forgot. Did your buzz research include ’search’ terms? If yes, then do you really think that’s reflective of what users would want on a social network? I mean, the top Google search terms wouldn’t reflect what FB, Bebo and others offer.

Almost every new mobile social network I’ve seen come out over the past few months are based on location with media sharing being the major play.

Paul - our buzz research counted the number of times that the mobile social network brand name (e.g. “Peperonity”) was mentioned on Web pages, as measured by Google.    So it doesn’t have anything to do with search terms, but measures the degree to which that social network is mentioned on the Web as a whole.

@Steve - so, what about the terms that reflect the user benefits/features - such as media sharing, picture uploads, photo sharing, where are my friends? and so on? That’s what I’m most interested in.