(Credit:
Bluepulse)
What's the difference between Bluepulse, Facebook Mobile, and MySpace Mobile? Unlike the others, whose services were adapted from the Web site to the WAP site, Bluepulse was born on cell phones, and its engineering team focused solely on designing a simple, useful social network anyone can use on a Web-ready phone.
New features
Three new features keep to the mantras of simplicity and quick broadcasting while also adding convenience. People are now able to import friends' e-mails from Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, and AOL by either cherry-picking friends or importing them all. While there's a way to add friends by searching for their phone number, name, e-mail address, or Bluepulse log-in later on in the process, the new feature begs for a search field to keep the socially promiscuous from thumbing through 20 pages of friends.
A second new addition takes the form of a daily summary of your activity feed, sent to you via e-mail or SMS if you haven't logged on to Bluepulse for 24 hours. This complements a feature already firmly in place, the optional SMS or e-mail alert you get when you receive, for example, an invite request or message. The friends you've imported via e-mail will receive something similar to this in their in-boxes every time you send them a message via Bluepulse, but don't worry, they can opt out.
A selection of seven emoticons make up the final addition to Bluepulse's mobile social network. Now people can select "pixs" instead of "text" to send one of these smilies to anyone in their network. Like IM, I'd like to be able to mix images with words, but CEO Ben Keighran cites technical reasons why Bluepulse is currently holding back.
(Credit:
MySpace)
"A lot of browsers can't handle text and pictures," he said. An image appended by more than four or five words can break simple mobile browsers, he says, but creating a full-blown emoticon and text set for select phones is definitely an option.
MySpace Mobile Web
Bluepulse isn't the only social network with a mobile presence to get work done. Earlier this month, MySpace Mobile Web left beta and made its big push as a much richer mobile app than the beta. Plus, deals with Sprint and Verizon make it much easier for people to directly access their MySpace content as a shortcut from the phone's Web portal. MySpace Mobile Web users can update their profiles, post blogs, peruse photos, and send and receive messages from these shortcuts or by pointing the cell phone browser to m.myspace.com.
It's the year of social networks wrought with the mobile experience in mind. I spoke to five companies peddling their handheld experience as The Next Big Thing; here's how they stack up.
Bluepulse is the most advanced of the bunch, with a messaging service core and a profile, activity feed, and friend-of-a-friend discovery as other central activities. Messaging is easy. The single in-box shows status updates, all message types, and friend requests, and filters within this section highlight new messages and allow search.
You can post photos and 3G videos, but click-to-call is still under development. I dig the automatic spell check and basic grammar correction, but wish the messaging had a drop-down menu or predictive text to quickly choose from among friends. Unlike others, Bluepulse is purely mobile, operating on a slim and simple WAP site that never looks right from the desktop.
Based out of the U.K., Trutap has much more momentum abroad--in the U.S. the closed beta only works on AT&T and limits all-in-one IM to MSN, Yahoo, AIM, and ICQ services. Trutap is more a mobile facilitator than pure mobile social network in that photos and posts push to partner sites--Blogger, LiveJournal, Flickr, and so on. Trutap friends can also chat in-network.... Read more
Today bluepulse, a free mobile social network, announced a platform shift that will give smartphone users access to the free service for the first time. Bluepulse is now Webware.
The bluepulse in-box stores incoming and outgoing messages, and status updates.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Until now, the strictly-mobile social network installed on JAD and JAR downloads to Java and Symbian cell phones, but wouldn't run on smartphones like Pocket PCs or Palm Treos. Migrating to a wholly Web-based app opens the door for smartphone users to take advantage of the service's instant messaging and social discovery mash-up.
In addition to making the switch to Web, bluepulse also adds an all-in-one message in-box and out-box that stores status updates, text messages, and friend requests in a single location, much like a Facebook feed. Another feature, group friending, applies the transitive property to help users connect to their friends' friends, thus extending their network.
Adding friends can now also be accomplished en masse through invitations to Facebook, AIM, Hotmail, Yahoo Messenger, Gmail, MSN, and MySpace contacts.
Users can join bluepulse by pointing their mobile browsers to http://www.bluepulse.com.
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