It is one of the hottest of topics for mobile operators, the harnessing of social networking sites and behaviours to the mobile environment. But are operators in any position to remain in the loop?
With the discussion of the development of mobile social networking sites never hotter, it seems everyone now has a mobile social networking strategy in place. The question is, will operators merely be passive beneficiaries of new tools and applications on the market, or do they risk losing advertising dollars and brand awareness to other players?
Yahoo! has just announced the second of its One range of mobile services, this time a presence enabled messaging service that puts your SMS, email, IM and social network conversations all in one place, categorized by user, not by "Service." Messaging communications are threaded, and you can see all your threaded communications with a specific contact in one place, along with their status, any recent updates they have made to community sites and so on. What Yahoo! appears to have done is build and launch what every one else is talking about – the integration through open APIs of all your contacts and friends from your existing phone contact list, social network communities and email into one, presence-aware, location-aware, centralized contact list.
Marco Boerries, head of Yahoo!'s Connected Life programme, demonstrating the service, showed how users can view their contacts by name, by activity, by accessibility and by proximity. The service can even use Bluetooth, GPS or cell info to discover the proximity of people who are not in your contact list. Boerries said that although users can download the client direct to the handset, or access the service through their web browser on the handset, Yahoo! remains committed to working with operators, and is not seeking to bypass the operator..
"We are a company with a proven record of long term partner relationships," he said. "When we partner with a company we benefit in terms of discovery and navigation, and the whole market grows for everyone." He also said that although Yahoo! has to give back a share of ad revenues to operators when it partners with them, it still remains in Yahoo!'s interest to seek out partnerships.
"Many operators are really only starting to get to grips with IM, and this is so far ahead of that it takes a bit of time for them to get their heads round it. But this absolutely does not replace operators' SMS and IM strategies. In fact it builds on them and is likely to lead to increased usage and visibility of these services," he said.
A second major announcement in this area is one of Nokia's first under its OVI brand, beyond its already announced music service. "Share on Ovi" is a Flickr meets YouTube meets social networking file storage and sharing application, under which users can build a personal homepage, either using Share itself or dropping in other services, such as Flickr. Over 100 file types are supported, and the service is available from any web browser. But Nokia has also developed a client specially for N Series devices that will give an enhanced ‘Share' experience. This looks like a bit of a tie-in then to sell more devices attached to the service, but as Nokia is at pains to say that the service was all about being open, this is perhaps a slightly mixed message. Some animals are more equal than others, it seems, and ceo and president Oli-Pekka Kallasvuo admitted as much when he said Nokia was all for a level playing field, it's just that once they're on the field, Nokia tries to pay the game a bit better than everyone else!
As for that old canard, Nokia's relationship with operators, Kallusvuo said that Nokia and mobile operators, sharing a common mobile background, make obvious partners, and he thinks they are still natural partners. The cake's plenty big enough for everyone to have a slice or two, he said .Niklas Savander, vp software and services, said that Nokia has decided that it will go to market quickly with OVI, and that inevitably there will be some holes in the service, but he thought the priority was just to get the service up and running, and then perfect them later.
Despite the big names entering the field, there are other players who are looking to tie the most important information on our phones, our contacts and addres book, into other social contexts.
Zyb is a company that has conducted research that suggests we keep the contact information on the people most important to us – our closest friends, family and close business colleagues – on our mobile phones. With that in mind, the Zyb Social Phonebook provides "new ways of staying in touch with the people you really care about". This includes letting users see availability information on a contact they are about to call – so they may hold off on that late night call to avoid waking the other person up, for example. More interestingly, perhaps, and mirroring Yahoo!'s approach, is the ability for those users who want to stay in even closer touch with their friends, to be able to receive aggregated activity streams from other online services as well as getting direct access to their profiles on these services (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and LastFM).
Runar Reistrup, Product Director at ZYB, explained, "When you want to call someone, the normal mobile experience is that you do so with limited information on the person you are calling. The Zyb Social Phonebook will provide you with live, updated information on the availability and recent activity of the person you are about to call or text – which will ultimately change the way you use your mobile phone."
Tommy Ahlers, CEO at ZYB, said, "When you meet someone for the first time and they give you their mobile number which you enter, the Zyb Social Phonebook you will instantly get their complete contact details, updated thumbnail picture and links to their different online social networks downloaded to your mobile address book. "A year later you may like to get back in touch with them but perhaps their contact details have changed. The ZYB Social Phonebook ensures you always have their up to date contacts details on your mobile."
Using the phonebook as a means to stay in touch does little to threaten operators, but what if the phone book is bypassed? One possible challenge may come from the social networking sites themselves. Back in October 2007 Facebook Mobile had four million active users, and that number is now up to six million. Yet those numbers may be set to soar further as Facebook launches its Facebook for Mobile Operators service.
Facebook for Mobile Operators is a terms of service arrangement into which Facebook has bundled all its experience with dealing with mobile technology to date, to allow any operator, no matter where or what size, self-service access to Facebook services. At launch Facebook is offering MMS and WAP site services, and already has Vodafone on board. Vodafone will be launching the service in eight of its territories. Jed Stremel, director of Facebook for Mobile, said that the terms of service internet approach means that there is no need for lengthy contract or technical discussions. Operators can enter the settings for MMSCs or gateways into the self service portal, and be up and running.
"Operators are passionate at the moment about providing sticky services and driving up data ARPUs. I think we are about to see a ton of operators sign up to this," he said. "There's already operators out there entering their settings and getting ready to go as early as next month. And there's just no way we could have managed that many partnership agreements." With 64 million active users, and a photo service larger than all the other internet sites combined, is Facebook is a dream proposition for mobile operators, or a threat?
"It's really a illustration of how Facebook is different. We have a technology led approach to solving problems and we think about things on a network level – meaning things like session management and latency are important. We don't view it as the mobile internet and the internet, it's just the internet – and our mission is to have our services universally accessible on any device," said Stremel.
Stremel said it would be up to operators how they would manage the positioning of Facebook mobile services within their portfolios. To date operators have gone down the partnership route with companies such as MySpace and Yahoo! – integrating and optimising these sites and services into their own portals and screen menus.
But Facebook is not offering partnerships to operators, this is a terms of service agreement.
"It's one thing to launch with Vodafone, and we're proud to do so, in eight territories, but it's less common for small regional operators to be partnering with Silicon Valley companies. We have taken the 12-15 existing operator partnerships we have, all those common elements, and distilled them down into simple terms of service that reduce the complexity and the friction of setting up mobile services," Stremel said.
A further option for operators is to develop their own communities, rather than rely on a slice of the pie from the online providers. 3UK and O2 are merging their look-alike user generated content TV download services into one brand entity. 3UK's SeeMeTV and O2's LookAtMeTV services will be merged into one brand, called eyevibe. The plan is to evolve the services from their current TV download models into fully functioning mobile communities, with chat, messaging, user profiles, tagging and search functionality. To do that, 3UK and O2, and YoSpace, the Bauer subsidiary and technical services provider that owns the brand, decided that they would have more success if they combined their communities, and made the service open to all mobile users.
Jane Wilding, lead product manager for social networking, 3, said, "The way forward for mobile communities in the mobile space is to be open and accessible for all. I don't know why we thought a community will work when users can only communicate with each other on the same network – it doesn't make much sense."
There don't look to be any current plans in place for other operators to become partners of YoSpace in the way 3 and O2 have, although users of other networks will be able to access the service, albeit they will have to pay data charges to do so, as well as the 10p download charge. 3 and O2 users will have the download cost included in their 10p download price.
Dave Springall, cto of YoSpace, which was bought by Emap which was then in turn bought by Bauer, said that the new service would have moderated chat capability, as well as tagging, searchable profiles and all the usual social media functionality. At the moment the services are being merged from a technical point of view, and YoSpace expects to have the new, merged service up and running after a month, he added.
O2's John Talbot said that users would see dual messaging on the portal for a while, alerting them to the fact that the change was coming. And he said Bauer has committed £1.2 million advertising spend across its radio, online and print products to the promotion of the service.
Chris Lawson, Bauer's digital marketing director, said that would be real money in high profile slots and spaces, rather than merely free fillers for "3am radio ads we can't sell". In the long term, Lawson confirmed that Bauer plans to sell ads into eyevibe, and obviously building identifiable communities within the service will help it do that. Clearly there's a threat to the mobile space from the likes of YouTube, and what Google plans to do with it in the mobile space. But O2's Talbot pointed out that the mobile operators have the bonus of proven monetisation for users, paying out 10% to contributors of successful videos.
Clearly, there is a mixed message from the operators here, on the one hand claiming great success for the UGC TV services, but on the other admitting that if they didn't open out, they were unlikely to succeed as mobile communities. They would argue, perhaps rightly, that this change marks a shift from video download services to actual mobile communities built around the creation and sharing of video, and personal information. Which takes us back to Yahoo! once more.