O2 offers free social networking app to prepay mobile customers

O2 Ireland has launched a new mobile social networking application called O2 Social Link, with San Francisco-based developer iSkoot. The app acts an aggregator for the most popular social networks – and is available for free for Prepay customers who top-up regularly.

What does Social Link do?

The app is pretty much platform-agnostic – it will work on over 70 handsets that O2 sells in Ireland. Once it’s on your phone, you can register it with the different social networking services that you use. Your Facebook, Twitter and MySpace accounts can be set up to feed updates directly to the app – and whenever you want to check them, you just fire it up. It doesn’t even need a modern data connection to work, as Social Link will load new updates over 2.5G if it needs to.

It also has a nice bit of customization for the Irish audience: it aggregates content from the most popular Ireland-specific news sites and feeds.

What’s this about PrePay?

Data services can be tricky for pre-pay customers. This app is a free, value-added service for O2 Ireland subscribers – but the majority of customers on pre-pay don’t buy data. They just use voice and SMS.

To get around this, O2 Ireland has what it calls the “Experience Plus” and “Experience More” plans. If you regularly top up your pre-pay account – by which they mean topping up at least once every 30 days, with a single payment of €20 or more – you automatically qualify for the the Experience plans. The “Plus” plan gives you unlimited calls and texts to any O2 phone in Ireland. The “More” plan is just for texts, but it gives you an unlimited amount to any network in Ireland.

So in order to get this app on as many phones as possible, if you’re a pre-pay customer on either of the Experience plans, you can get the Social Link app for free as well.

What we think?

First of all, I’m doubtful that any social network app launched by an operator will get much use. It’s just not the way most people use their phones. They download whatever social apps they want – or they access their favorite on-line social networks through  web browser. Being pushed a social networking service by their operator won’t appeal to most people. But you have to give O2 Ireland high marks for effort – the app isn’t all that bad, and by pushing it out to the data-less prepay customers, it’s encourage users to get involved with data services.