Mobile social networking in London

Yesterday saw the second Social Media World Forum run in London – an entire day of presentations and speeches by the social media community. I was chairing the mobile branch of the event , so I didn’t get a chance to do any interviews, but there were a lot of interesting tidbits about mobile social networking that I pulled from the event.

Integration is the new app store:

During 2008 and 2009, it seems like everyone with a toe in mobile launched their own mobile social network. Brands, operators and OEMs all launched their own version of Twitter or Facebook… and discovered that just copying what was already out there doesn’t work. It looks like 2010 is going to be the year of integration for mobile social networking. Rather than seeing new networks being launched (and sinking) we will see networking being built further into the structure of existing mobile services.

Facebook is kicking ass on mobile:

There are now around 80 million people using Facebook mobile. Almost every presenter during the day mentioned this at least once. That’s roughly 1% of the world population using a single mobile service.

Facebook isn’t the only horse running:

In most countries Facebook isn’t the most popular service. The USA and UK have massive Facebook mobile usage, but regional networks in non-English speaking countries are still massively popular and widely used.

Services provide the old main drag:

During one of the panels, we discussed the three-way relationship between mobile handsets, the services that run on them, and the networks they operate on. When asked which of these three would drag behind the others, our panelists uniformly agreed that services are running behind both the handsets and the infrastructure. In effect, that handsets and operators provide the canvas, and services come along afterwards to fill the space.

Mobile operators are both a blessing and a curse:

It was pretty much universally acknowledged that while the best way to make a service a success is to get it launched through an operator, the slow speed at which the networks move make it a practical impossibility for most service providers.