Yahoo! may have fallen into the ’stick a lowercase letter at the front’ trap with its latest foray into social networking for the iPhone but the app itself looks pretty useful.
oneConnect (wow, that’s THREE lower-case letters, ee cummings over here!) is a contacts manager for the iPhone that integrates with both the phone’s native contacts list, Yahoo! Addressbook and all the leading social networks - Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, etc.
Users get instant status updates from their frinds and can set their own statuses across all the services.
Gathering all the contact info in one place makes it simple to call, SMS, email or IM (only Yahoo! IM at the moment) any of your contacts with just one tap.
The app is a free from the App Store.
Nokia is looking to firm up ties with Facebook and we don’t mean by carpet-bombing every Nokia user on the planet with a friend request.
Nokia’s head of Internet services, Niklas Savander, has stated that Nokia is talking to a handful of the bigger social networking players, including Facebook, so that in the future Nokia users will have a much slicker, direct access to social networking sites from their handsets.
“The world is a mashup — we have to make sure we have the key things in the offering. Facebook is one of them,” Savander said.
Indeed one of the ways in which Nokia intends to do this is through its ‘Share on Ovi’ media sharing service, which was given the social networking treatment last month when it was launched as a Facebook application.
With the forecast for handset sales set to diminish, Nokia is obviously looking to other revenue streams to keep things ticking over, and online services seem to be as good a bet as any at the moment.
(Via Reuters)
Sniff is a mobile social networking application that is intended to show you the location of any of your friends and family that have signed up to the service.
For 50p a time, users can query the service about a particular friend and receive a text containing the name of their location and a link to an online map.
The service works across all UK networks, which might raise some privacy concerns about how Sniff is using the location data it has acquired access to.
Sniff maintain that the data is used only on the strict understanding that it is not stored or shared with other companies. The service is ‘opt-in’ and it is a simple matter to become ‘invisible’ to other users if you want to drop off the grid for a while.
It’s still a worrying prospect, though. When you signed up for a mobile contract where you aware that your location data was going to be made available to private companies? Shouldn’t the real opt-out here be at the network level - a simple tick box on the website to say that you don’t mind your location being funneled into someone else’s data mine?
Mobile social networking is a great idea, but using a keypad to navigate most social sites can be a bit of a chore.
Blabnote hopes to change that by offering a social networking service that is controlled entirely by speech.
It’s a closed beta at the moment, so all we have to go on is the contents of the promotional site, but essentially this is about calling a number and manipulating contacts and creating ‘events’ by saying things like ‘Invite Dave and Sue to Dinner’ or ‘Join the group called East Midlands Pigeon Fanciers’.
t’s a nice idea, but this kind of servic4 will stand or fall on the software’s ability to recognise your voice commands. Its no good launching a national service if it is going to be confounded by some of the more - ah - idiosyncratic regional accents and require power users to learn Received Pronunciation.
The other factor that might hinder uptake is the same one that means that texting is so popular - you can do it silently in public places and use a shorthand to communicate concisely. If people are going to actually have to say LOL and WTF things are going to get strange.
Industry analyst Juniper Research reckons Mobile Web 2.0 will generate $22.4 billion of revenues in 2013, up from $5.5 billion this year. What’s Mobile Web 2.0 when it’s at home, though? You might think the term covers social networking and user-generated content stuff, which it does, but Juniper has thrown mobile search and mobile instant messaging into the mix too. Apparently, us mobile users are going to be ‘prosumers’ by 2013, creating content as well as consuming it. Juniper reckons that just the social networking and UGC side of things will be worth $11.2 billion in 2013, with growth as fast (if not faster) in developing countries as in the West. ”Combining the power of the social network map - namely: ‘who I know, how I know and where I know’ - with that of mobility, presents the greatest opportunity for revenue generation of any of the applications as defined within Juniper’s Mobile Web 2.0 framework,” says the report’s author Ian Chard. In other words, some of the many mobile social networking companies touting their wares now are going to be rich. Although many aren’t. Place your bets now…
Mobile social networking is building up a head of steam, although it has to be said that much of the hype is focused on the mobile efforts of the big Web firms like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, despite the fact that a lot of the innovation is coming from mobile startups.
iPhone offers an opportunity for the latter to grab some of those column inches. Influential tech blogger Michael Arrington is already on the case, with an enthusiastic post about an unnamed startup working on a social networking app for iPhone:
“It shows you everyone around you who has it installed on an iPhone (default privacy is set to off, but can be changed). Users can scroll through nearby users, and set filters for men, women or age ranges. If you find someone interesting you can pull up their profile and ping them. If they respond you can start a chat, on the phone or in person. Of course, they can also choose to block you.”
It apparently uses the iPhone’s built-in triangulation tech to identify nearby users, in the absence of GPS. Arrington also suggests that the startup has found a way around the fact that native iPhone apps won’t be able to run in the background when you’re using an iPhone. He’s not allowed to say how though. The shots above are mockups, apparently. Thoughts?
