Comments for Mobile MySpace On Sprint: Do Carrier Deals Make Sense?

Mobile MySpace On Sprint: Do Carrier Deals Make Sense?

2007-12-13T17:25:32Z

Fox Interactive announced today that it has a deal with Sprint to offer one-click access to the new MySpace Mobile portal when it launches early next year. Sprint and Fox have had a mobile relationship since before mobile meant much, in fact. This could be a sneeze turned into a press release, but it's also a good opportunity to examine carrier-based mobile content deals vs. open social networking on mobile.

]]> Early press on the deal says Sprint will be first but it does not say that it will be an exclusive deal. It was around this same time last year that MySpace announced a deal with Cingular that would let that carrier's customers use a Java app for MySpace for $3 per month. Helio, a high-profile handset that operates on the Sprint network, has allowed access to MySpace since last year as well. This week Helio launched a mobile YouTube interface that the company says is the first to allow YouTube users access to their accounts and social features.

The primary question this raises, though, is this: why not just open a free, universally accessible mobile MySpace like Facebook offers? Facebook Mobile is excellent and would provide as good a model for MySpace as the Facebook Newsfeed did for the new MySpace friend feed. (See our coverage of MySpace vs. Facebook in general.) Just add some adds and superfluous pageviews and you've got MySpace Mobile. Perhaps MySpace felt it was not capable of monetizing mobile access except through carrier deals. That would be interesting news for the rest of the industry.

Mobile access could be a key step in MySpace regaining growth momentum, but that seems more likely if the company were to open mobile access to all. It's an interesting trade-off and I wish I was a fly on the wall at the meetings where these decisions were being made.

Tracking the Mobile Content World

Thanks to Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang, who called attention to the news first in my world, on Twitter. We're looking to increase our coverage of mobile news and issues here at ReadWriteWeb. If you're interested in this space as well, you can download an OPML file (a bundle of RSS feeds for importing into your feed reader) that contains some of my favorite mobile content sources and mobile news from our blogs ReadWriteWeb and Last100, filtered via FeedRinse: RWWMobileFeeds.opml. Save the file behind that link, import it into your feed reader and you'll be up to date on the fast emerging world of mobile content. You can preview the live contents of this collection below, using Grazr.

Comment from Martin on 2007-12-13

2007-12-13T19:42:57Z

Hi Marshall,

Carrier deals are a double bladed sword. Companies doing that might make some money in the short term. However, since a single carrier only addresses 30-40% of the population (and users of a service in a country) the majority is antagonized because they are locked out. On a global basis there are several hundred carriers you would have to talk to in order to offer a mobile service to your global audience. Again not something than can be realistically attempted over the long term. So I think such experiments will fail.

Cheers,
Martin

Comment from Marshall Kirkpatrick on 2007-12-13

2007-12-13T20:13:40Z

thanks Martin, that's my feeling too but perhaps these companies feel like open content leaves money on the table. in this case, i'm not sure that access to the content will be closed as much as there will be easiest access through sprint. if mobile advertising is still just a dream then this form of monetization may in fact make sense.

Comment from Jason Grigsby on 2007-12-13

2007-12-13T20:44:57Z

From everything I can tell, MySpace does have a "open a free, universally accessible mobile...like Facebook."

You can go to http://mobile.myspace.com to see it.

All that today's announcement means is that Sprint is putting a link to it on their landing page that people see when they start up their browser on their mobile phones.

In fact, the "free" access is a joke as far as I can tell. It's not free like iTunes Music Store access at Starbucks where you are able to access their wireless network for that store, but no where else without charge. Instead, Sprint is saying that it is free--as long as you are paying for Sprint's data plan.

Basically, this a lot of hype about a link. It is no different than the various deals in the 90s to gain icons on the Windows Desktop (see the large history of AOL and Microsoft). But there is nothing unique about what MySpace is offering on Sprint phones that you can't access on other phones.

As an aside, they've got a mobile page in beta which is good, but you'd think they would have defined the viewport size for iphone users. As it stands right now, MySpace mobile is tiny on the iPhone screen. A couple of meta tags and a little work and this wouldn't be an issue.

Comment from Carlo Longino on 2007-12-13

2007-12-13T22:04:09Z

http://mobile.myspace.com/ is an openly available, ad-supported site. The carrier deals for it, like the Sprint one, are about delivering eyeballs to it by getting prominent placement on Sprint's portal. FIM's trying to build traffic, not trying to get more exclusives.

Comment from Nikhil Kulkarni on 2007-12-14

2007-12-14T10:38:13Z

This is so so typical of an old economy company (Fox) which has recently forayed into (acquired a player in) web2.0 space. They are trying to impose the 'deal making rules' of the old economy on the new economy - but as Jason pointed above its similar to the rush to "to gain icons on the Windows Desktop" in the 90s.

Comment from Liza John on 2007-12-14

2007-12-14T11:17:12Z

Great to know about such new innovations & also feels like its a new trend thats hitting the mobile network markets to coup with the competition because I came across this site which stated that they would make facebook, linkedin & such other social networking sites accessible on mobiles without internet,GPRS or EDGE & also states that registration is free & many more similar features. This is where you find it
www.modazzle.com?channel=mobilenet6

Looks like this is a in thing or something ?!?!?!