I was in the Social Meets Mobile event in San Francisco in the last week. The discussion included many interesting topics how social networking is coming to mobile. More than 50% of MySpace traffic should come from mobile in a couple of years. One interesting topic is also, what is social communications vs. social networking.
Social Networking is now associated strongly to certain type of services like Facebook. But social communications is basically all methods to be in touch with other people. And it is must more than social networking. This is actually something Xtract has emphasized long time, when we have made social network analytics e.g. from mobile communications. And now we can say that a person use at least calls, SMS, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and IM to her/his daily communications. How to manage all that communications, how to keep relevant contacts, how to find/filter when you get too much, etc.
There is a huge need to manage all this better. Many firms develop tools for web, but e.g. mobile device companies sees that they have important opportunity here, because a mobile device can be the home of important part of the communications. And a kind of meta trend is that internet is coming more a conversation platform than a stable home page platform. That puts pressure also to players like Google that has been the tool to navigate in the jungle, but now we go to a new kind of jungle. I believe strongly that social network awareness come a mandaory component to help users in this new jungle, but also to help marketers and advertsisers to find right people and send relevant messages.
