The future of mobile social networks.
For some time, the social networks focused on the mobile terminals they have been proliferating in order to gain a foothold inside our cell phones and even our computers. The general trend has been towards relationship with our contacts communication with them using the tools provided by the network itself and the contribution of contents more or less centralized.
Within this category we could have Club Zed and Ovi, which allow us to send media to the web application and maintain a certain relationship with our contacts. But future of mobile networks you can’t get stuck there, because the activity of our contactsaka lifestream, throughout the network along with the geolocated media as the image, the video, the audio or the text itself are beginning to arrive. It no longer just matters what you are doing, or even showing it, but when, where, with whom and what is emphasized, with Brightkite or Groovr being a good example.
‘Sgroogled.com’: when MICROSOFT launched ANTI-GOOGLE ads
Some networks such as Plazes, Dopplr, Facebook or MyStrands have begun to take their first steps to get a piece of the cake that local search engines are beginning to take over directly on the mobile that have proliferated Google Mobile Y Yahoo! Go. Especially interesting is the case of the latter, whose future version (which is supposed to be released) will include juicy new features, which will not only improve the application, but also establish a path to follow very closely.
Yahoo! Go proposes to unite the local search with the network of contacts, unifying the activity of our acquaintances in various web services together with the synergy of a multiprotocol instant messaging client.
Others, like Zyb, stand aside with one of the best web services, also app but less value, I’ve seen to date creating a synchronization of the data of our terminal in a Remote server to which they have just integrated social functionalities such as the possibility of adding contacts and viewing their life stream.
Obviously the future of mobile social networks it can’t just add a social character to a mobile web application and a list of what my contacts are doing. A priori, it may seem that the current movement is to transfer what we can do from a desktop computer to a mobile phone with the added potential of geographic locationwhich, however, remains very dispersed, very disaggregated.
Yahoo! seems to be planning FireEagle, which is nothing more than a microblogging system in the style of Twitter but geolocated that Google it seems that he already thought about unifying Google MapsDodgeball and Jaiku, but it hasn’t been implemented or even planned. FireEagle can become the perfect counterweight to Twitterwhich requires other web services to be able to geographically locate our messages.
How do I think a mobile social network should be? Instead of opting for an external system, why not integrate the style zybor the total integration proposed between gmail, gcalendar, etc. within terminals with Android operating system, all our data no matter where we are connected (computer, mobile, smartphone,…) wherever we have our social contacts fully merged with contacts of our terminalbeing able to manage our presence (seeing that a contact is sleeping would make us think of sending them an email or an SMS instead of calling them on the phone), geo-location of the contacts (under certain configurable privacy levels), increase the communication options (voice call, video call, SMS, MMS, email, instant message, twitt, event notification, etc.), management of contact groupsview the media either recent activity of our contacts, without the need to use a 2.0 client where their activity produces noise, the possibility of sharing calendars, media (audio, video, photographs, etc.), among a long etcetera of functionalities.
The basic idea that I want to capture is the integration of our mobile terminal in a unique setting versatile enough that it won’t be necessary to install more than one application that manages the synchronization between mobile and remote web server.
zyb (with various improvements), Yahoo! Go (once you integrate Yahoo! oneConnect) Y Google AppsMobile (if it can be improved before or after the arrival of Android) are my bets, although today, the Blackberry terminals with the applications of Yahoo! Y Google they are slightly closer to the utopia that I may be proposing.
