Social Networking

Networking Your ‘Social Flow’: Part II

On Tuesday, TechCruch had a post about the future of mobile networks; something I had written about in a post a few weeks ago. Their article is very well written, and I encourage you to check it out.

The basic idea is that the future of mobile social networks lies in the development of proximity-based networking, something which I describe as your ’social flow’. The people who you are around on a daily basis all have stories and profiles to share, but right now, there is no service available that can really get the job done. Nokia’s attempt, dubbed Sensor, never really got off the ground; and meetro is a downloadable IM client (apparently for your laptop…otherwise it woudn’t make much sense.) that is struggling to develop a user base and is a bit short of a truly applicable mobile interaction interface, but is a bold attempt to break the ice. There are quite a few startups in Europe that are testing new approaches that hopefully will flourish and hop across the pond to the US.

I don’t want to completely rewrite TechCrunch’s article, but the thing I want to drive home is that there is a major ‘chicken and egg’ problem here: a mobile interaction network will be useless until many people are using it, but most people will not use it until most other people are using it. It becomes and endless cycle of the consumer waiting for the market, while the market waits for the customer.

Hopefully we can look forward to a development sometime soon…

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