iPhone throws spotlight on hyper-local social networking
Despite activation problems that were described as a "fiasco" in the US, Apple managed to ship over a million 3G iPhones on launch day Friday and over the weekend. Also, the new App Store is estimated to have enjoyed over 10m downloads in the same three-day period. Handset makers love to trade headline shipments figures of course, but the most interesting aspect of the iPhone is the wider impact its massive publicity machine has - by throwing a spotlight on new mobile trends. One of these is hyper-local mobile services, especially social networking - not unique to the 3G iPhone for sure, but gaining a new profile from iPhone applications.
Most smartphone makers know that the hot buttons in the mobile internet are location-based services and social networking, and if you put GPS in the handset and mix the two features together, this drives significant increases in mobile web usage. Even greater uptake - and greater differentiation from PC-based services - could be stimulated by going hyper-local, and there will be a race between the big names like Facebook, and the mobile specialists, to get there first.
The latest mobile MySpace and Facebook applications suggest that the big brands will win out, believes US magazine Mashable. Announced for the 3G iPhone and other platforms, these two giants of social networking have both made their products far more sophisticated than their initial mobile versions. And their clear edge over mobile specific social networking systems like Loopt and Whrrl, both also available for the new Apple phone, is that users don't have to download another piece of software and become part of yet another social network.
Loopt and Whrrl were early in integrating their services with GPS so that users can locate their friends accurately and create hyper-local interactions with friends (or strangers when ad hoc connections are enabled) currently in the neighbourhood. These services then integrate with other location-based features like finding restaurants or bars, and social networkers can do microblogging with small local groups, and hyper-local reviews, all based around GPS.
Now Facebook and MySpace will soon follow suit. The new Apple versions integrate with any iPhone's camera, allowing for direct upload of pictures to user profiles, and Facebook has incorporated chat too, and the two majors are expected to tie their services to GPS functionality on the iPhone as early as September. At that point, the advantage of the mobile specific apps could disappear. Perhaps their greatest hope lies with the mobile operators. Keen to control the social networking phenomenon rather than just provide the bitpipe for it, some cellcos are putting the application at the heart of their mobile web offerings. Particularly prominent in this is T-Mobile, which has made social networking the lead app in its web 'n' walk portal and tariffs, and is introducing a service that allows users to keep track of all their social networking sites and profiles from a single dashboard. That could be the best survival route for the mobile specialists - unless, like some start-ups like ZYB, which sold to Vodafone, they can get a lucrative acquisition by an operator, portal or handset maker.
So it's more than reasonable to state that a hyper-local social networking boon could be on the horizon if Facebook, MySpace, or even Twitter, find a way to tie their services or their third-party applications into the GPS functionality of the iPhone 3G.
Here's why:
Most people and their friends already use these services. There's no new software to download, no evangelizing new tools to friends. It's a natural and automatic extension of, for one example, Facebook Mobile's status update.
The built-in status or feed options lend themselves well to automatic location sharing, whether it is an intersection or a restaurant, shop, salon, etc.
These status updates could easily connect to user-written reviews or even feed conversations about specific locations. (Note: Loopt already integrates with Yelp, but one still needs to install Loopt to benefit.)
These status updates could also be customized to either update all friends or to update only friends who are within a certain radius.
Finally, all but Twitter currently have integrated social ads. According to Ostrow, partnering with a hyper-local advertising service such as AppLoop would create an improved mobile monetization model for the social networks, as well.
"I would think that's the direction they would want to go into. It's a niche as a service but could be very big as a feature of existing social networks," Ostrow said.
Some might say that since other phones, such as the BlackBerry, have had 3G features for some time and both Loopt and Whrrl have existing applications for these, this hyper-local social networking explosion would've already happened. Again, the numbers don't lie. In March, M:Metrics (now comScore.com) reported that the iPhone is the most popular device for accessing news and information on the mobile Web. From the report: Usage of social networking is also popular among iPhone users: 49.7 percent accessed a social networking site in January, nearly twelve times the market average. Twenty percent of iPhone owners accessed Facebook, one of the first Web properties to customize its content for the iPhone, versus 1.5 percent of the total mobile market.
"The iPhone demographic is definitely better suited to these types of features," Ostrow said. "The more progressive Apple fans tend to be a lot of the heavy social networkers and they are probably more likely to use this stuff."
The reality of this could be a bit daunting to the firms who have invested significant dollars into the niche location-based social networking players, though it could also represent opportunity. It's possible that we'll see Facebook, MySpace, Twitter -- and maybe even FriendFeed -- step into this game and acquire the likes of Loopt and Whrrl and create a bit of much-needed social networking consolidation.
