Presence is the essence of any mobile social network says CEO TruTap Doug Richard

In an interesting presentation delivered without slides today at Mobile 2.0, TruTap’s Doug Richard highlighted the themes vital for socialising mobile devices.

But, before this he also made the point that the Internet was not mobile and that the mobile web is very different to online. This is important for understanding the message later delivered.

But in essence Presence is vital to any social network. Presence or the availability of a presence server is the hub of how you communicate. Would you make the call if the presence key is set at Do Not Disturb? Adding presence to the idle screen of a mobile phone allows users to manage “who they want to talk to”. More over it enables the way in which you communicate.

This means that presence becomes a social graph for interaction with users and the way in which you communicate. Sometimes voice is replaced with IM or SMS depending on the busy, free, talk to me or green button next to the profile.

Now I agree with this. But there were a couple of things today that Doug mentioned that I didn’t agree with. One of these was that the Facebook or Bebo on mobile would not dominate. He said that these are online services essentially and pure mobile services will work on mobile.

Now I realise that TruTap’s aim is to be THE mobile social network. It is trying to do this by offering a free messaging interoperable service to consumers. But the fact of the matter is that Facebook is already mobile and so is bebo. The convergence of mobile and online prevails at present.

Moving on there might be space for a pure mobile application to carve a stronger niche within the community but the need and infrastructure needs to support this. This isn’t happening at the moment.

On top of that the competition in the mobile social network space is rife. We recently signed a new sponsor (more information shortly) that is a direct competitor to TruTap and focusing in on the US market where Mr. Richard says that TruTap uptake is nominal.

I feel that any social mobile network needs to be global. If not, then thread of the network is diluted – as is the potential.

But on a more positive note, I asked Doug two questions that only raised the bar for TruTap succeeding in the near future.

The first question I asked “is TruTap white label” and the response was “TruTap is white front”. (This means that the front page can change to say a brand “powered by”) This is very interesting and also hugely essential in mobile. The service can be gleaned to highlight the mobile operator but also will make the brand (D2C) TruTap stronger by integrating consumers for a mobile operator.

On top that I asked, do consumers want a lot of identities? Will signing up for TruTap come down to just another social network and password to remember?  Doug focused on the interoperability and “social platform” of TruTap. Via one mobile application users can view and use all social networks in one space (similar to the Google OpenSocial and Yahoo! OneConnect) model.

The difference is that this is made for mobile solely.

When things get too big they need to get smaller or there are new opportunities available. The point of a pure mobile social network is that mobile as an entity hasn’t sufficed yet. It’s still early days and I’ll be downloading TruTap tomorrow – more once I have tested it.
 

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