Mobile Social Networks

Here's a really good piece of analysis of the landscape of mobile social networks. I will not recount the findings in detail here but they reckon that the Internet biggies Facebook and MySpace rule the mobile social networking world already. MySpace is said to have had 1.4bn visits last month alone. Facebook also is beyond the 1bn mark. Impressive numbers! The largest pure mobile-play, Mocospace, a predominantly US-focussed company, recorded 1bn visits.

The article does mention GoFresh (with their ItsMy service) and Peperonity but fails to point out UK company Yospace who power the combined O2/3UK community.

Whilst the mobile-only players all point out that they're not worried because their offering was better ("he would say that, wouldn't he, your Honour?"), but advertising muscle may well be an issue: MySpace recently said that they would expect about half of their total traffic coming from mobile within 5 years, and reaffirmed that mobile is one of the most important strategic initiatives for MySpace. I am sure there will be loads of niches in the sector but the bulk of 1.5bn visits (probably steeply rising) is a tough proposition to beat when it comes to ad revenues!

Zed's community is precious!

Zed announced that it "will unveil a bunch of hugely ambitious community services at CTIA". The new stuff was apparently previewed at a closed press briefing in Madrid today, to which, alas, I was not privy... Test services will apparently go live in two weeks’ time during CTIA.

Zed had announced it had invested a whopping EUR50 million in a web 2.0/mobile 2.0 strategy to drive subscriptions around community services "such as multiplayer gaming, IM, blogging and so on".

After former owner Sonera had sunk legendary fortunes into developing Zed into some monster brand, most people thought it was more or less doomed. When Spanish group LaNetro took them over though, it re-positioned itself and, with 85% in-house produced own content (no royalties) and sometimes contested subscription bodels grew revenues to a rather impressive $320m in 2006.

Now, in the community area, Zed is said to contribute some of the cash it invested into statiOn, an application for PC and mobile that consolidates all these services in one place for Zed subscribers. Version 2 (what a fitting version number for a web 2.0 app) will apparently be launched at CTIA.

Whilst I believe it is entirely on the money to predict that "the mobile market will go the same way as the wired internet in the direction of community services", I am not sure if a - arguably complex-ish - PC-mobile application is the way out; this does not give anyone anything new. In fact, a lot of social networks and communities already today seamlessly evolve into platform-agnostic things: Jaiku uses mobile as a major part, Facebook Mobile sees more users, MySpace and, again, Facebook have announced recent deals in the mobile space, Yospace (acquired by Emap; see also here) is serving 3 and O2 UK, my fine employer Hands-On Mobile has launched Yatta-Video on SFR and soon on other carriers, and everyone else has a "social network" or "community" suite on offer. So will we really need a specific application (downloadable?) that will help connect the two media? Isn't it much rather about seamless -- dare I say it? -- convergence WITHOUT the need for additional (complex) application layers? Isn't this one of the public secrets of web 2.0, its incredible ease of use?

Zed concludes its analysis that "the future is certainly not in solo personalisation products". Well, yes, that might be true but is it really well enough positioned to capture users on their quest into the social networks, too, in particular in the light of the above? I will never ever discount Zed again, so I am truly intrigued by what they will announce and I really hope it is something exciting and innovative. Go on!

FHM & Heat bet on UGC - EMAP puts Yospace to work

It took them a short while to wrap the acquisition of Yospace up and digest everything but now EMAP announced they'll be relaunching their FHM and Heat brands on mobile centered around the coveted UGC; and all will of course be driven by Yospace's platform. The blurb published by NMA (you need a subscription to read the full article) reports that "it is still too early to officially talk about the services" [why do they then???] but the intention is basically to leverage the brands to drive user-generated video content.

For those not so familiar: Yospace powers the successful SeeMeTV service of UK operator 3. FierceMobileContent tells you why it's great.

I am curious as to what this will mean other than the EMAP team seemingly struggling to transfer editorial onto the mobile platform in a successful business model...