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10 Mobile Social Networks to Check Out

Written by Richard MacManus / June 9, 2008 6:00 AM / 27 Comments

Earlier today we covered a mobile social network called Buzzd, which will be featured at the music festival Bonnaroo. In this post we outline 10 mobile social networks to keep your eye on. It's a developing field - and there are issues such as hardware compatibility to overcome - but we expect some of these services to make a big impact in the next year or two. Because, as Sarah Perez recently noted, with 975 million Mobile Web users expected by 2012, this is a potentially very lucrative market.

Of course our list is subjective, so please leave a comment if we missed one of your favorites. Also let us know your thoughts on social networks going mobile. We've written before that MySpace, Facebook, and MSN are the leading mobile services - and March stats indicated that MySpace is the leader. But surely there will be one or two unknowns who rise to capture this nascent market. So with that in mind, here we go...

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Dada

Dada is a mobile SNS that enables users to update personal blogs with pictures and video, download mobile entertainment, connect with and meet other local singles in real time and stay in contact with all their friends. Dada can be used on both PC and mobile and dada.net is its portal destination page. The 3 main products within the portal are Dada Dating, Dada Life (personal space and social networking), and Mobile Entertainment.

See: Dada Leads Mobile Social Networking Charge

Strands

Recommendations company Strands started out as a music discovery mobile social networking service. Its mobile features include a mobile Web portal, a personalized radio station, and a personal version of partyStrands (its service for party organizers, bars, clubs and DJs). Strands' mobile social networking service basically enables its users to find music and network with their friends via their mobile phones.

See: MyStrands Revamp - More Integration Between Mobile, Online and Physical Worlds

Itsmy

The itsmy.com mobile community wants to be MySpace for your phone. By connecting people and content in both the U.S. and E.U., itsmy has already gathered up more than 1 million registered mobile users with 4 million mobile home and content pages and continues to grow. Recently, itsmy announced they've now launched 100,000 personal mobile TV channels - one for each of its top 10% of content uploading customers.

See: itsmy Launches Personal Mobile Broadcasting

Frengo

In April mobile social networking company Frengo released a toolkit for development of Open Social and Facebook applications on mobile phones. The Open Social Mobile Toolkit supports MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, and Facebook and allows developers of applications on those networks to extend them to the mobile phone. In addition to extending support for the Open Social and Facebook platforms to the mobile phone, the Frengo toolkit allows developers to monetize applications via the company's social advertising platform or via premium SMS.

See: Frengo Launches Mobile Open Social Toolkit

Twango

In July 2007 Nokia acquired the media sharing service Twango. Twango combines online storage with social networking, allowing users to organize and share photos, videos and other personal media. ReadWriteWeb wrote an in-depth profile of Twango in January '07, in a post entitled Twango Tackles Lucrative Media Sharing Market. Nokia planned to use Twango to enable users to share multimedia content through their desktop and mobile devices.

See: Nokia Acquires Media Sharing Startup Twango

Shozu

Shozu is not strictly speaking a social network, but it enables you to share your videos and photos via your mobile phone - e.g. from your Flickr account, YouTube, Facebook. RWW reader Honor said in a past post that "it allows me to send the pictures I take with my n80 to Facebook and share with my friends, or email people pictures while I am at an event, shopping for stuff for them etc..."

The final 4 services are from Corvida's post on ReadWriteWeb entitled: The Future of Mobile Social Networks: 4 Promising Services

Brightkite

We recently profiled Brightkite as a winning mobile social network in the arena. Brightkite allows for your network of friends to keep track of where others may be at any moment. Since no GPS is required, users can send updates to the service via text messaging or email, to update their profile with location updates, pictures, and notes. With a host of privacy settings to prevent any form of stalking, Twitter users are increasingly using the network to update friends with status locations sent to their Twitter streams. Brightkite may be one of the best mobile networks to use, especially when going to a conference or big event in town.

Zyb

Taking a different approach from Brightkite, Zyb aims to be a mobile contact organizer for your social network. While we already have our address books for this, Zyb looks to provide a way for you to backup and synchronize your contacts online. You can store your phone numbers, calendar and texts, manage this information online, and transfer your information to a new phone if there ever comes a time. You can also use Zyb to find out who has you in their phones as a contact and even discover friends of friends. Think of Zyb as an expansion on your Facebook pictures and contacts only more mobile.

Groovr

Groovr is your mobile network's night out on the town. Post a picture, message, or video to your Groovr profile and have it sent to all your friends too. Instant chat? Groovr's got you covered. However, some of these features are redundant. Can't we already send messages, pictures, and videos to our friends without a third party? The only feature we found remotely unique is a city's Explore page on Groovr. All of your posted items are sent to the corresponding cities Explore page. Here's a peek at San Francisco on Groovr:

Fon11

Developed by MoBlast Technologies, Fon11 could become the hottest mobile social network for the iPhone. With a nice UI (of course) and great features like the ability to see just how far away your contacts are from you, availability status messages, visibility settings and more, it seems Fon11 has a lot more to offer than the rest of the pack. Fon11 has already been ported to Android and Nokia Web Runtime with development plans in the works for J2ME and Windows Mobile platforms. While GPS remains an issue through no fault of Moblast, we've been assured that there are many strategies in development to find a resolution.

We hope you enjoyed this look at 10 interesting and exciting mobile social networks. The information in this post came from a variety of past ReadWriteWeb articles and we will continue to explore this promising market. In the meantime, please list your favorite mobile social networks in the comments below.

See also: Mobile Web Trends & Products, March '08 Update


Comments

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  1. You may also want to include Mocospace.com - the third largest mobile social network according to Opera browser co.

    Posted by: Don Jones | June 9, 2008 9:35 AM



  2. No BluePulse?

    BluePulse interview

    Posted by: xavierv | June 9, 2008 9:46 AM



  3. No BluePulse?

    BluePulse interview

    Posted by: xavierv | June 9, 2008 9:47 AM



  4. Good Coverage.

    I wrote a post about what I want from my mobile social network, would love to see some of those issues addressed by the upcoming networks

    http://sachendra.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/what-i-want-from-my-mobile-social-network/

    Posted by: Sachendra Yadav | June 9, 2008 10:39 AM



  5. please don't forget whrrl.com.

    Posted by: Michael J Lambie | June 9, 2008 11:32 AM



  6. irovr.com is a great social site for the iphone.

    Posted by: sean808080 | June 9, 2008 12:51 PM



  7. There is http://www.aka-aki.com/index.php?lg=en, which is pretty cool .. german startup.

    cheers

    Posted by: Vincent Nicolai | June 9, 2008 1:38 PM



  8. The 3G Dating Agency is a mobile networking site that let's you use multimedia features of 3G mobiles to safely meet with new friends.

    Check it out at the3gdatingagency.com

    Posted by: Romi Parmar | June 9, 2008 3:43 PM



  9. What about Mojipage.com ? It's compatible with pretty much every phone out there.

    Posted by: Arseny Lebedev | June 9, 2008 4:49 PM



  10. Hey friends here is an application Movie Message which allows you to Listen to thousands of lines from Hollywood’s greatest movies and share them with your Facebook friends. Add a personal message or just let your favorite actor say it for you.

    Posted by: Marc | June 9, 2008 11:20 PM



  11. Don't forget mobimii.com! A mobile social utility with Free Chat, IM to MSN, Yahoo, GTalk, QQ, Gadu Gadu, content sharing (Video, Ringtones, wallpapers, photos) and more. True mobile social networking through a java download to your phone, on the mobile internet or through the mobimii.com website!

    mobimii.com also links into your favourite social networks like Facebook to centralise your social networking experience!

    www.mobimii.com

    Posted by: Grant Fleming | June 10, 2008 1:14 AM



  12. Don't forget Lifestylers either. Live on 20 mobile carrier portals in North America, Europe and Australia. www.lifestylers.com

    Posted by: Per-Fredrik Hagermark | June 10, 2008 6:53 AM



  13. I have found BrightKite to be usefully addicting.

    Posted by: Andrew Hyde | June 10, 2008 9:09 AM



  14. Itsmy honestly looks like complete crap. I'm not really sure why it's on the list. The rest look promising though!

    Posted by: DavidB | June 10, 2008 11:31 AM



  15. I dag er en dejlig solrig dag. Og jeg lykønsker Dem med dette. Lad dine spiritus vil altid være på højeste niveau! :)

    Posted by: Petrucho | June 10, 2008 1:48 PM



  16. Amazing how fast this industry is growing. We did a competitive analysis for mobile social networks 6 months ago and only came up with 3 of the ones on your list.

    hmm...Brightkite is really getting mixed reviews, not sure yet what all the hype is about but I do see the usefulness in certain circumstances.

    With mobile right now you have to be cross platform to survive. Fon11 knows this and have taken that step to be available no matter your carrier or phone model.

    What's interesting is that Facebook currently has the users but hasn't done much to develop in the mobile space. Sure they have the blackberry and iPhone apps but the overall UX and and usefulness is really lacking. Do they have the potential to fall if they can't adapt and make something truly suited to to the mobile user?

    One other thing - do you need a "smartphone" to use all of these? The true winner will work on dumb phones as well.

    AF

    Posted by: Alex Funk | June 10, 2008 3:42 PM



  17. Buddycloud has potential as well. They have a series 60 app that records where you go so you can mash it up with your friends, discover places to go - or just keep a twitterish journal.

    Posted by: Ben Nolan | June 10, 2008 5:02 PM



  18. There are some reasons why Social Networks will disappear soon:
    http://www.slideshare.net/ishmelev/code-web-20-461604/

    Posted by: Ivan Shmelev | June 13, 2008 3:24 PM



  19. This is a great information !!
    i put this page in my favorites

    thanks

    http://www.paradix.org

    Posted by: Paradix | June 13, 2008 11:43 PM



  20. www.RubberSquid.com is a cross-platform "gated community" - it's free too.

    Posted by: Paul Manze | June 14, 2008 5:26 AM



  21. Jag.ag - mobile social networking platform for creating and sharing digital content.

    Posted by: boazon | June 14, 2008 7:31 AM



  22. Mojipage.com will be good...

    Posted by: Alex | June 16, 2008 12:11 AM



  23. With Goojet you can share services with your friends and keep in touch with them whatever their mobile: see www.goojet.com

    Posted by: ludo | June 20, 2008 3:16 PM



  24. I know that this is Aussie-based, but I use Messmo Publisher to get my content (text, links, thumbnails...then moving towards audio/video formats soon) across for one of my projects.

    http://www.messmo.com/

    Really fascinating list though. I think Australia is slowly catching up...I've read of 2 new mobile social networking projects in Brisbane in the past week!

    I've also boookmarked the aforementioned links too.

    Posted by: ms.mobile | June 22, 2008 12:23 AM



  25. Alex Funk, any chance that you have a link to that analysis or if there is any web resources out there concerning that? I am very interested!

    Posted by: ms.mobile | June 22, 2008 12:25 AM



  26. Thanx for sharing this info, Did you got chance to look at href="http://www.mobiyard.com">Free Mobile Dating Software, I think they are cool...

    Posted by: MobiYard | June 27, 2008 6:12 AM



  27. my friend have nice mobile network

    Posted by: Blogger | July 8, 2008 9:31 AM



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