Younghee Jung and Per Persson gave an interesting lecture on Friday 8/4/05 about mobile social networking, from the Nokia standpoint, at Stanford, available online through video here (you may have to register online first). John Kern summarizes the topic of the lecture well:

This research project considered how a mobile phone could be used to augment face-to-face conversation. How can one express some public information about yourself to others? What if you could retrieve some information about your shared social network?

From the Stanford synopsis:

Telecommunication products and applications have great influences on the ways people behave, perceive and construct their social identity and relationships. On the other hand, users appropriate communication products over time to adopt them into their everyday lives. The design of such products and applications therefore entail much more than good usability at hand: It is about the social system that is manifested through user interactions enabled by the products, and how the community of the users experience the product over time. This is particularly important in the domain of mobile social computing since it is difficult to simulate social experiences in order to validate the concept with users.

Younghee and Per indicate that the social networking application will be launched in May for Nokia Series 60 phones. The upcoming Sensor embedded application will allow people to express themselves to others in their proximity, using DigiDress identity pages.

Nokia tested thoroughly the social implications of having discoverable identities on mobile phones, in particular with respect to:

• the identification of people you'd like to meet in a proximity situation;
• the use of identity information for breaking the ice;
• the further use of the mobile phone for increasing interaction by sharing content, etc.; and,
• the archiving of exchanged identities and instant messaging for later recall.

However, the focus groups they ran raised a number of issues, including reluctance to share identity information in a proximity discoverable situation, as well as the good point that "if you need an application to communicate with others, you might as well not communicate at all." So the application was simplified and different types of security features were built in, in particular to comply with legal and copyright restrictions.

Herein lies a major difference between the proximity aspect of physical social interactions and the centralized aspect of online social networks (LinkedIn, etc.). A great point was raised at the end of the lecture by someone in the audience: future wi-fi and mobile devices will be able to "mash" the internet and incorporate centralized social networking (more here), so the "social" safeguards built into the Sensor application may become a moot point.

Overall, it will be exciting to see this application in use, although it is heavily dependent on the penetration it achieves. In other words, it is of no use if only one person in a party has the application.

Then again, achieving penetration is partly the marketing department's job, right?

Via Russ Beattie and John Kern

Technorati Tags: mobile, social, networks

April 10, 2005 in Mobile & Wireless | Permalink

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