I will be contributing to a speaker panel on the Next Killer Application in Mobile Social Networking at the Mobile Web Europe conference in London in September and am gathering some thoughts on the subject.
So far, I have identified 4 potential candidates for what this next Killer App could be:
1. Mobile Dating applications
2. Mobile Social Network Aggregators
3. Virtual World or Second Life type applications that incorporate Instant Messaging
4. the Phone Address Book
I will be discussing the first 2 candidates in this post, while the remainder will be the object of a subsequent post:
1. Mobile dating applications are currently limited in their use of technology and frankly, have not made their case powerfully enough compared to web-based dating sites. Meetmoi, a $1.5m-backed mobile dating service launched last year still relies on SMS texting and requires the user to update his location manually-hardly revolutionary in the light of advances in location technology.
However, rumour has it that Microsoft is developing a mobile dating service that relies on Image-based face search in order to match prospective dates…a step in the right direction in terms of killer applications.
2.Mobile Social Network Aggregators (such as Spokeo) have attracted increasing levels of interest this year, in part due to the proliferation of mobile social networks and the tiresome task of keeping up with 4-5 different profiles and passwords. Different strategies are being deployed, with some aggregators going for Identity consolidation, others for message consolidation and others still for friend tracking.
Only a few days ago, news emerged that SonyEricsson was planning to release soon its own version of a social network aggregator, 3GLifestore.The game is hotting up…though would I pay €29/year to join Spokeo? Maybe not…
...to be continued
