The world got its first look earlier this week at Nokia's XpressMusic phone, a music-focused handset with loads of media-sharing and social-networking features including Facebook. According to a Wall Street Journal story on Thursday, it appears that there may be a deeper partnership forming between the social network and the handset giant.
The two companies are reportedly just in talks, the Journal said, and there is not yet an indication as to which Nokia handsets would have the Facebook app. But it's possible that a compatible Nokia phone could link directly to Facebook profiles in its address book.
This is a big deal because Facebook, for all the hundreds of millions of profiles in its system, doesn't currently offer a great system for managing contacts. When blogger Robert Scoble attempted to use a script to export his Facebook friends' information to address book service Plaxo, Facebook promptly suspended his account. Facebook mobile applications for the iPhone and BlackBerry make it relatively easy to call or text a Facebook contact whose phone number is in the system, but you can't sync your contacts with a phone's main system.
The Journal article noted that Facebook also has been in talks with both Palm and Motorola regarding potential partnerships.
Loopt a la Android. (Click for larger image.)
(Credit: PRNewsFoto/Loopt)Location-based networking service Loopt has now gone live in Google's Android marketplace, and is compatible with "select phones" that run the open-source operating system.
As with other handsets' versions of Loopt, the app lets you track your Loopt-using friends on a map and find other members in the area. They can also share their location with social-networking and messaging services like Facebook and Twitter.
Prior to launching its iPhone and then Android apps, Loopt was restricted to carriers with which it had signed contracts, like Verizon and Boost Mobile. Typically, it was a subscription service that cost a few extra dollars per month.
"From the start, our goal has been to build a ubiquitous interoperable network in which customers don't have to worry about who has what provider or mobile device," Loopt CEO Sam Altman said in a release. Well, with the iPhone and now Android, it looks like they're getting there.
On Thursday, Kadoink, an audio-messaging service, officially announced its beta Web site. The audio-delivery service, summarized at the Under the Radar Conference, sends MP3s, and voice and text messages to individuals or groups from your phone or the Web, harnessing one of seven widgets to automate updates.
Kadoink's phonecasting audience takes in social butterflies, particularly the party-going set. Ka...doinkers (?) are encouraged to send voice and music clips from gatherings, concerts, and other too-cool-to-be-true events. It does require an initial time investment to create friend groups online or by phone, the latter method that requires texting-specific messages to Kadoink's shorthand code.
Like Utterz and YouMail, Kadoink is a mix of Internet management with voice activity initiated from your cell phone. For instance, the service's music-sending, group call, birthday widgets, and so on, you create online within your Kadoink account, then can publish to one of many social networks and blogs.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
I quick-published a birthday widget on my Facebook profile from Kadoink.com via the MyStuff application. Then, I entered my cell number into the Facebook widget to leave myself a birthday greeting. A few seconds later I received the call; Kadoink's automated voice service prompting me to leave a birthday greeting. A text message then graced another phone, informing me of the birthday greeting that I can collect on my actual birthday.
The system appears to work more or less seamlessly, though some functions seem more useful than others. Gloating to five friends at once about a great concert I'm attending is a worthy application. If I want to leave a friend a birthday message, I'm more likely to call her up myself.
Verizon, Sprint-Nextel, and AT&T/Cingular users can text Kadoink's code--33033--to send messages. T-Mobile and Alltel users will find limited functionality while Kadoink continues negotiations.
New social networks are born each day, and at the Under the Radar conference (see all posts) a new batch is on display. Most are in early funding stages, and one is so new it's still in closed beta. The other three are ready for a try-out.
I'll give Frengo this--it's certainly different than most mobile chatting services. Case in point: Neither of Frengo's main competitors, Twitter and Jaiku, asks users to vote, compete in contests, or earn points. In that sense, a bit of the social-discovery element of social networks creeps in. Except, of course, the goal isn't necessarily to become friends with other users. Frengo is more interested in social collision--sort of a tamer, more innocent Hot or Not. Example? The Flirtable Facebook application launched last Thursday.... Read more
In the Messaging and Sharing track at Under the Radar 2007, four evolving players hawk their wares. I recently covered two of them, Trutap and Utterz in the mobile social networking space.
Heysan (CNET review) is a free mobile instant-messaging service that connects to major IM networks, including Windows Live Messenger (previously MSN), Yahoo Messenger, AIM, ICQ, and Google Talk. The wholly Web-based service is roughly modeled on Meebo, with its single buddy list and tabbed conversations. Heysan is ad-supported.
Trutap is a downloadable app that aggregates instant messaging, picture messaging, photo uploading, social network access, e-mail, and SMS in a single communications hub. The biggest announcement is that Trutap is now out of closed beta and available in public beta. In the U.S., AT&T users can try out Trutap, with Sprint coming soon.
Utterz, like Trutap, takes on multiple modes of communication and media sharing. It assumes that its users have multiple social network and media accounts, and provides a service to push your voice, text, or photo "utters" to multiple locations on the Web: a blog service, Twitter, or friend network, such as Facebook. Utterz is now out of beta.
yoMedia sees itself primarily as a video delivery company. Registered users can upload videos, which yoMedia will convert for the Internet, 3GP cell phones, or even TV. In addition to pushing your own content to the PC or phone, users can discover others' video contributions on yoMedia's site.
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
Earlier today, my colleague Elinor Mills covered the announcement that Google had purchased the Helsinki, Finland-based microblogging company Jaiku. It's the third oddball move in the mobile (or semi-mobile, as microblogging is) social-networking space that Google's made in the past few years, with its reported acquisition of Zingku late last month and the ill-fated buy of Dodgeball in 2005.
RedMonk analyst James Governor thinks this may not be the last microblog acquisition we'll see. In fact, he said, Google rival Yahoo may be after Jaiku rival Twitter, the company that put "microblog" in everybody's mouths when it hit the scene at this spring's South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Governor wrote in his Twitter feed (appropriately enough) that he thought Yahoo was ".9 probability" (i.e. very likely) to purchase the Bay Area start-up.
When CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland got curious and asked Governor to elaborate, the analyst responded: "(I) plucked it out of thin air," he said in an e-mail. "Google and Yahoo are in dueling acquisition mode, and Yahoo is almost certain to respond. Especially since Twitter has begun to use a footer on SMS messages it sends out--which could of course be used as a microbillboard."
The potential parent company, naturally, isn't talking. "We don't discuss speculation," a Yahoo spokeswoman said when asked about the possibility.
Governor also surmised via Twitter that Jaiku, or the technology behind it, may eventually become part of the much-rumored Google mobile operating system. Blogger Robert Scoble, however, said that "the more troubling thing is that Google acquires companies and then we never hear about these companies again. Will that happen to Jaiku? I hope not."
CNET News.com's Elinor Mills and Stephen Shankland contributed to this story.
Looks like Google is acquiring Zingku, a site that offers a social network for mobile users. "We've entered into an agreement to have Google acquire our Zingku service," the site says.
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Zingku)
A Google spokesman confirmed the news: "I can confirm that we acquired certain assets and technology of Zingku. We believe these assets can help build products and features that will benefit our users, advertisers and publishers. Aside from that, we have no plans to announce at this time."
The move is only the latest on Google's part in the mobile space. In 2005, Google bought a social-networking service called Dodgeball that links people up through text message. The company hasn't really done anything with it yet. Then in July, Google acquired Grand Central, a company that allows people to merge all their phone calls into one number.
And Google launched its free voice-activated local search for mobile phones in April, in addition to offering maps and Web-based local search on mobile devices.
Helio's Buddy Beacon was hyped, but it's the social networking mainstays that are actually getting used by mobile customers.
(Credit: Flytip.com)New research from the mobile-focused statistics firm M:Metrics has focused on exactly how many mobile-phone customers are using their handsets to access social networks and blogs, and the results aren't particularly surprising: not a whole lot of people are.
In the month of June, a total of only 12.3 million mobile consumers in the United States and Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) accessed a social-networking site or blog on their phones at least once. In the U.K., this came out to a total of only 2.5 percent of mobile users; 2.8 percent in Italy; 2.3 percent in Spain; 1.9 percent in Germany; and only 1.5 percent in France.
Interestingly enough, the highest percentage (3.5 percent) was in the U.S., which is typically thought to lag behind European and Asian countries in mobile-media consumption.
Mobile social networking is something that you hear a lot about, and not just because Facebook has just launched an iPhone-optimized site. As the M:Metrics results show, Web and mobile-media companies can see plenty of potential for growth simply because there isn't a whole lot of social networking going on in the mobile space yet.
Sometimes, the potential for growth has led companies to attempt to develop strictly mobile social-networking features--often carrier-specific, such as those of Helio's GPS-based "Buddy Beacon" service. But not surprisingly, it's the mobile-optimized versions of existing popular social-networking sites that have proven to be the early leaders.
In the U.S. and U.K., MySpace.com's mobile site is the most popular (despite only being available on several carriers) with 3.7 million users in the U.S. and 440,000 in the U.K.; Facebook comes in second place with 2 million users in the U.S. and 307,000 in the U.K.
Third place in the U.S. was YouTube, with 901,000 mobile users; third place in the U.K. was Bebo, with 288,000. (Recently, another firm's statistics showed that Bebo may be passing longtime leader MySpace in the U.K. when it comes to unique visitors.)
In the four other European countries, MSN Live Spaces was the most popular mobile social network. Also of note is the fact that in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, the 13-to-17 age demographic was the one doing the most mobile social networking; in the U.S. and U.K., it was the slightly older 18-to-24 demographic.
There were a number of presenters at Tuesday night's New York New Tech Meetup, but the one that everyone seemed to want to know about was Gatsb, which has the potential to be one part Twitter, one part Radar (previous coverage here), and one part Yelp. I say "has the potential" because those comparisons largely sprang up from the audience at the Tech Meetup. Founder Andre de Cavaignac, who was demonstrating the site, just portrayed it as a cool way to share camera phone pictures online with location data.
(And, yes, it's pronounced "Gatsby.")
In order to sign up, you send a text message that says "hello" to x@gatsb.com and follow the instructions in the text message reply that it'll send you. It currently works with the major carriers, excluding Sprint, so I couldn't actually try it out because I'm a Helio user. But once you've gotten started, you can share mobile phone photos as well as information about the location where they were taken--venue names, street addresses, intersections, etc. You can also use Gatsb's mobile functions to announce your own location and find out where people on your friends list are (akin to the now-essentially-defunct
What Gatsb needs right now is direction. The audience at the Tech Meetup seemed impressed that the site manages to mesh nanoblogging, photo sharing, and location-based services--multiple commenters raised the possibility that Gatsb could start focusing on user-generated reviews (like Yelp) with a mobile-oriented, always-accessible slant. That could certainly differentiate it from the Twitter-clones that have been popping up recently, and could make it either a popular service for social urbanites on the go--or a hot acquisition target. But it's got a long way to go.
It's cool, definitely. It's in a very, very, very early stage. And the commentary at the Tech Meetup was encouraging. We'll keep an eye on this one.
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