In my recent post about social networking in 2007, my predictions about mobile sparked some good discussion and comments. Here’s what I said:
1) Social networking will not go mobile in 2007.
Sure, lots of vendors are going to offer SNS on mobiles in 2007, but it won’t catch on to become a major force. With data plans and handsets as they are, mobile use just doesn’t match our use expectations of SNS. SNS is about browsing – and until mobiles let people richly and cost-effectively browse, our phones are going to remain glorified address books
At the same time, danah boyd shared some of her great insight into mobile SN’s, and Howard Rheingold linked to a post that was positive on long-term aspects for mobile SN’s. I’m going to effectively straddle the fence on this issue, standing by my statement that 2007 won’t be the year for mobile SN’s, but I do believe that mobile SN’s will be deeply integrated into our mobile experience in a few years.
Ok, so why won’t 2007 be the year for mobile SN? Two things. First, there really aren’t many viable offerings. We have Dodgeball and Facebook mobile, but these services simply haven’t made significant inroads with the mainstream market. There are also some exciting vendor-specific services, but these walled-garden plays just aren’t going to catch on – as long as you have to change your service provider to get access to the service. Second, handsets are behind the curve; many of the target market for mobile SN’s are on Razr’s or less – and it will be another year or two before they cycle out of these handsets into next gen handsets that would actually support media-rich applications. Finally, data plans are prohibitively expensive, and to think that teens are going to shell out 100/month for mobile plus unlimited data is expecting too much. It isn’t that teens don’t opportunistically waste this much money a month, but the mental price point is prohibitive.
These are three significant barriers for the mobile SN industry, and in the meantime we’re going to be using TXT based mobile SN’s like Dodgeball. Why don’t these services have mass appeal? The answer to this comes through use patterns of social networks. In most studies, two main uses of SN’s among young people emerge. The first use is time-wasting – i.e. browsing your friends and their friends endlessly, social grooming by leaving comments and changing your profile, etc. The second use is as a directory – i.e. how do I get in touch with Johnny.
Until cross-carrier rich apps emerge, SN use one (time-wasting) is completely out the window for mobile. It is expensive and annoying to try to browse a social network by text message. And in case two, directories – well, our phones are our directories. As Richard Ling and Bridgitte Yttri showed in their study of youth mobile use, teens clearly use their phones as directories. And what happens when they need a number that isn’t in the directory? Well, they could either waste ten minutes texting with a mobile social network, or just call their friend and ask them to Facebook their friend for them and get the number.
So the problem here is how the teen information needs are answered. Information needs are a large part of why we use technologies. And generally, as rational people, we will use the most efficient means to address our information needs. Until mobile social networks can cost-effectively, efficiently answer our information needs, whether they be browsing/grooming or directory needs, we aren’t going to use them. Yeah, it would help if they were fun, too, but what the mobile SN industry really needs to do is answer these young people’s primary needs, and then build from there.
Postscript: Interestingly, it may not be mobile providers or applications designers that really bring mobile SN’s to the masses – it may be campuses. At many campuses, including UNC, technology departments are looking at ways to integrate ambient intelligence into the infrastructure. With the convergence of RFID, mesh networks and wifi-enabled devices, it may be the campus that delivers the social network to the students. In fact, they’re already doing this at MIT.
Tags: adoption, mobile, social networks
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
Good post. Totally agree on the walled gardens and
blogged here from a different angle as well
Fred – are you assuming US-only? There’s already a lot going on in Asia and there are very different carrier/handset dynamics in Europe… I’m not betting US in 2007, but i am betting social network systems in either Europe or Asia.
Ahh – thanks for catching that. I am talking about the US market only. Thanks…I might update the post w/that so it makes more sense.
Well, we reckon by the end of 2007, we wont be able to be described as niche :-) Lots of changes coming for us over the next few months, watch this space! Andrew – Founder, playtxt.net mobile social network.
I’ve been using Twitter since it launched this summer and really liking it. It’s got good growth, committed backers, and an active developer community. I get that there are barriers to to entry due to the cost of SMS but the number of youth with high volume text messaging plans is growing fast.
I agree with Zephoria. A lot of the mobile social network crowd will cath on with mobile social networking. Cellphones are only moving up in popularity. By the way SMS doesnt require the use of your browser. only at the initial start when joining a network like peekamo or twitter.