CTIA: VeriSign tackles social networking

SAN FRANCISCO -- While mobile social networking is the forte of innumerable funkily named startups, the old-guard vendors are showing they won’t be discounted when it comes to the new service category. VeriSign unveiled its social networking platform at CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment, a platform that happens to integrate directly into VerSign’s SMS and MMS infrastructure portfolio.

The basic component of social networking is communication, which all cellular networks already have in spades, said Warren Faleiro, vice president of multimedia applications for VeriSign’s messaging and multimedia division. “We’re looking at it from a carrier point of view,” Faleiro said. “A lot of them already have the infrastructure for social networking. They have media sharing and albuming—a lot of which we already power. That’s the first approach: just integrating social networks with SMS and MMS.”

The platform is called Xoomerang, which VeriSign is offering to operators in an ASP model. While Xoomerang will have a media-rich client, the basic platform allows customers to interact with their social communities through the basic text and media messaging capabilities on their device. Using short codes, users could upload a video file to YouTube, post a picture across several social networking sites simultaneously or simply post a short blog message—all without adding any software to the device or accessing a site on the mobile browser. Xoomerang does this by accessing the same application programming interfaces that developers use to create applications for sites like Facebook or MySpace. Instead of using those APIs to integrate with a Web application, though, they’re used to link the sites with a carrier's SMS Center or MMS Center.

VeriSign wasn’t the only company taking a new look at the SMSC. Instead of focusing on new services, though, Interop Technologies is looking for speed. Interop announced its SMSC, the 4 Series, has achieved 36,000 message delivery attempts (MDA) per minute, what it claims is the world’s highest throughput for aggregation centers.