Rethinking mobile's social explosion

The social-networking wireless revolution is coming; brace yourself and your business model! … OK, there's still time to prepare. But when the floodgates open during the next 10 years, everyone in the value chain — from content providers to advertisers to telcos to electronics suppliers — will be required to transform their business strategies to maintain relevancy, a recent iSuppli white paper warned.

While there haven't been any successful implementations of wireless social networking to date, the research firm is convinced that, with widespread adoption of mobile Internet devices, wireless social networking will explode with new iterations and new business models. These models likely won't consist of charging customers subscriptions, payments per use or any fees at all.

Consumers simply aren't willing to pay for a mobile social-networking service. Why should they when they've grown accustomed to getting it online for free? Yet, that doesn't apply just to Facebook and other sites from the fixed Internet — consumers don't want to fork over cash for their choice of hundreds of purely mobile social networks either.

This isn't necessarily bad news for mobile social-networking companies. It presents an opportunity to experiment with ads ingrained in the social experience. The types of users who take their networks mobile are likely the most willing to accept ads as a trade-off.

For the revolution to become a reality, mobile social networking still needs work. The experience could be faster, more robust and not limited to one carrier's network. Likewise, it will take a while to get the market for mobile ads off the ground. Advertisers still must get comfortable with the portable medium, and consumers must get comfortable with sharing a limited screen space with ads. As the two markets mature, they should go hand in hand. That way, when the purported mobile social-networking phenomenon explodes as promised, both can reap the benefits.

ONLINE

Gareth Maclachlan, CTO of AdaptiveMobile, joins Associate News Editor Sarah Reedy to discuss the implications of viruses for mobile operators and their customers.

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