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February 14, 2007

What is mobile social networking?

(And why ANTHEM makes sense for social networking service providers and carriers.)

I met with a venture capitalist today. We talked about ANTHEM and exchanged views of the future. He agreed that providing mobile subscribers access to multiple social networking communities makes sense, since increased consumer choice is always better, and popularity waxes and wanes. “But I am not even sure that putting social networking sites on mobile phones is ‘mobile social networking,’” He said. “I mean, will the dogs eat the dog food?”

(I have learned that last bit about referring to consumers as dogs eating dog food is a favorite platitude of VCs, along with “What’s your secret sauce?” and “What’s your China and India strategy?”)

Anyway, I understood his question and I think he’s right about “mobile social networking” being something different. Here is more or less what I told him:

First off, yes, the dogs will eat the dog food. And, yes, "social networking on mobile" is VERY different from "mobile social networking." I have used the MySpace and Facebook apps on Cingular, and they do pretty much what I expected them to do, which is provide access to my web-based social networking profile and some of the relevant features of their respective sites that allow me to browse other profiles and send messages to people. These applications are quite clearly “social networking on mobile.”

So is that enough? I mean, if mobile subscribers want access to the biggest trend on the net, shouldn’t we just put up the two or so biggest players like MySpace and Hi5 and call it a day?

Yes, it is enough for now, but is more of a great start for an even more exciting future.

Here’s why: This isn’t just a trend on the internet. This is an evolution in communication. What started with real-time point-to-point voice sessions via the telephone has turned into multipoint-to-multipoint asynchronous multimedia streams via devices with massive processing power.

Abstract your true “social network,” your friends and family and various acquaintances, from any means of capturing and representing them. A few of your best friends are in there along with several co-workers. Some family members, plus maybe one degree of separation like your wife’s friend who is married to that guy you would never interact with socially but are forced to because of your wife. Now think of the various ways in which you communicate with these people. Many of them are in your address book on your mobile phone, and you use it to initiate voice calls and to send SMS and MMS. Many of them, with a good amount of overlap, are in your email address book which is most likely tied to your PC via Outlook. A smaller number of them are in your IM buddy list, but still with pretty good overlap with your other address books. Now think of how many of them are in your friend list on any social networking site. I realize this post isn’t necessarily being read by 15-year-old girls, so you may not be the target demographic for social networking sites. But if you do have a social networking profile, you will agree with the following statement: There is very slight overlap between your friend list on [insert any social networking service provider here] and your true social network.

This is because social networking sites are not for maintaining social capital, they are for building social capital.

Great, but so what does that mean in the mobile space? If I can build social capital on my PC, can’t I also build it on my phone? Yes, of course, but dig into the details of the mobile value chain and things start to look dramatically different.

First off, wireless carriers operate closed networks in much the same way social networking sites operate closed networks. In fact, most wireless carriers consider their subscriber base to be a community and refer to it as such. Many carriers have had great success introducing intra-network services that only work with their community of subscribers. Boost Mobile’s Loopt is a good example of data-enabling their “chirp” PTT functionality through a visual map interface. It works because many people sign up for Boost in pairs, like a girlfriend/boyfriend, and their tagline, “Where You At?” is the most common phrase uttered into their phones after they chirp. 3 UK’s SeeMeTV is also a good example. (3 UK just announced that they adopted the ANTHEM platform, btw.) SeeMeTV is an exceptionally innovative feature that enables 3 subscribers to buy and sell user-generated content.

As popular as intracarrier features and applications may be, their primary function is differentiation, which means some features make more sense than others. For instance, SMS used to be an intracarrier feature, and carriers marketed it as a reason for you to tell all your friends and family (your social network) to use their network. But SMS is undifferentiated enough as a feature that usage soon hit a low ceiling. Since there was no difference to the consumer between Cingular SMS and Verizon SMS, it was not a compelling reason to adopt or switch carriers. Furthermore, consumers viewed SMS as an extension to voice communication and not as a unique feature. Nobody would use a phone that only called people on one network, so why should they adopt a messaging tool that didn’t allow the same freedom. Of course, when SMS turned into an intercarrier feature, adoption skyrocketed, and it is now the primary data revenue driver for all carriers.

Fine. So social networking in the mobile space definitely has to be a cross-carrier deployment. But what is the difference between “social networking on mobile” and “mobile social networking”?

Integration. By that, I mean integration to the key aspects of the mobile environment that create a truly mobile-relevant experience.

Go back to your true social network, and now tell me the tool that consolidates all of those separate address books and buddy lists. There isn't one. They are all little islands that you maintain separately. Your PC platform provides much of the glue that you use to maintain your relationships. You don't realize how important hyperlinks and cutting and pasting is to your ability to maintain linkages between separate programs. Furthermore, anyone who thinks that a mobile device with a browser is essentially a little PC with an internet connection and that a mobile consumer is the same as a web consumer, is going to make some mistakes in their mobile product strategy.

The few web-based social networking sites that have offered WAP versions of their sites have basically replicated web-based functionality and made it look pretty good on a small screen. Again, there is nothing wrong with this, and it is a great first step, but we aim to go far beyond simply offering web-based functionality on mobile devices.

The ANTHEM platform integrates deeply with SNS providers to offer whatever level of functionality they desire. So far, in addition to their branding and unique content presentation, our SNS partners are all offering core browsing, profile, search, messaging and alert capabilities that make their sites so sticky. That is the “social networking on mobile” aspect of the platform, and it really does look and act better than any social networking approach I have seen in the mobile space.

But then it goes a step further. 3rd-party content providers plug in to the platform and can provision their content via the SNS partners’ communities. So for instance, while it may be a web-relevant user experience to click on song download links, no carrier in their right mind is going to allow it without some degree of oversight. ANTHEM can replace those links with ringtone download links to create a mobile-relevant experience for users, but within the same context of the communities they are used to, and with a business model that suits the carriers' interests. Carriers typically have one or two content providers for such categories, and we plug them into ANTHEM and the experience is transparent to the user.

ANTHEM also provides SNS partners gallery integration. Whether on the device or a carrier’s server, ANTHEM removes the friction involved with taking a picture and sharing it with a user’s community. This enables SNS partners and carriers to create accretive business models around user-generated content. Add integration to the carrier’s billing system, and you have a way to share content in a marketplace that is defined as a social networking community that makes both carriers and SNS partners more money.

PIM integration is another important detail that differentiates “mobile social networking.” The carriers should view the PIM as a master list that includes all contact options including voice, PTT, IM, email, SMS, MMS, etc. Adding a user’s various friend lists from their favorite social networking sites is crucial because it enables users to blur the lines between “friends” and “Friends” and to seamlessly transfer their contact options across multiple modes. So while “social networking on mobile” might allow you to send a message to your friend on Xanga, “mobile social networking” would also allow you to ping that friend via PTT.

Mobile social networking is consolidated multimodal communication that blends the capabilities of the existing mobile ecosystem that enables you to maintain your actual social network with the community-based tools that enable you to increase your social capital. It’s the depth of integration to the mobile ecosystem and the extensibility of functionality that makes ANTHEM a useful approach for carriers and SNS providers. It also provides a more compelling experience for the mobile subscriber, which means better adoption and more usage.

There are other exciting features of ANTHEM that I’ll reveal over time. For now, I wanted to explain why I think it is important to enable this category with a structured, strategic approach using a centralized platform that allows for growth in the future vs. inking one-off deals with a few partners that may not unlock the full value of the opportunity for everyone involved.

Posted by Shawn Conahan at February 14, 2007 10:16 AM

Comments

Posted by: Adam MacBeth at February 27, 2007 10:36 AM