next2friendsblog.com

ABI Research recently released a report that is being echoed far and wide in the blogosphere and we wanted to highlight some of the chatter and throw out a few thoughts of our own.  They surveyed 500 people and found that 46% access a social network with their mobile phone.  And it turns out that Myspace and Facebook command the lion’s share of activity, with 70% and 67% respectively.  Other Mobile Social Networks, like Next2Friends, only command 15% according to their research. It went on to say that the primary uses of Mobile Social Networks (or web-based social networks that are extended to mobile) are commenting, responding to friends and giving status updates.

Read Write Web had some interesting commentary on the subject.  They noted that only 1% of Mobile Social Networks exist exclusively on mobile phones, the rest are extensions of some sort of web presence.  They further say that this does not speak well to the adoption of Mobile Social Networks. On the surface it doesn’t.

Perhaps more telling is a quote from the ABI Research site itself:

“The mobile social networking market is best described as emerging. With a very large number of startups and unformed business models shaped loosely around Internet-based equivalents, the mobile social networking industry has a long way to go before it reaches maturity and mass adoption.”

This is very much an emerging market with no clear winners or losers yet.  On the one hand you have such phenomonally powerful tools like live video streaming from mobile or instantly uploaded photos from mobile and on the other hand you have most people merely commenting and messaging back and forth using social networking giants as a courier.  Indeed, there hasn’t been a clear added social value that mobile necessitates.

Some point to Location Based Services, GPS Obsessed makes the argument rather well that if an already established platform like Facebook could integrate Location Based awareness into its mobile app, perhaps services like Geo Messaging could really take off.  Here’s an interesting graph they cite to support their argument:

Ultimately it could simply come down to accessibility.  We are still on the beginning curve of smartphone adoption with smartphones only commanding 15% of the US market (this is higher in many other countries).  We think we will see an ever growing base of people with high powered computers in their palm, and as that happens, so will the market grow for more heftier apps such as some of the cornerstones that Next2Friends is built on.  Either way it will be fun to see what the future holds!

Next2Friends - It’s NOW!