Session three – Mobile Social Networks

September 29th, 2007

Ok, now this is some seriously interesting stuff!! Move over, Cupid, here comes Kwame!

Kwame Ferreira is a service design leader with Fjord and was part of the team that developed Yahoo! Go (in collaboration with Christian Lindholm, while he was still at Yahoo!).

Kwame’s background is in sociable media and he is very interested in the sociable aspect of technology – something reflected quite clearly in this session!

He’s about to move on from Fjord to work on a mobile social network – however, sadly, he doesn’t elaborate since it is not yet live… After sitting on his session, one can only wait with bated breath!

Imagine the world in primitive times, Kwame asks us – think about man and fire… He points to the table we’re sitting at and draws an analogy – if this table were a fire, we’d be gathered around, chatting, making love and having fun… And we’ve move, from one fire to another, from fire to fire – building our social network. So, yeah, a fun time in history – granted, no Tescos or Sainsburys – so to get your daily dose of protein, you picked up a spear and went hunting… But still, good times, fun times…
And then, someone figured out that fire could be taken from place to place. So no longer would I have to go to other people’s fire, but could take my fire with me. “I’m on the move!” said the caveman, “Come join me!”

So now we have mobile fire and things change dramatically… and here is where our story of Mobile Social Networking begins.

Our story has two main characters: Ibrahim and Adrian, both drastically different, with extremely different approaches to how they socially network – yet both converging on the same, Mobile Social Networking.

Ibrahim is a shepherd – a pretty cool guy, does all the typical things a shepherd from Western Sudan would do – goes to the market on Sundays, meets people, socialises with his fellow shepherds. Ibrahim does not own a PC, although he does have a mobile phone.

Adrian, on the other hand, in a complete geek… He, of course, has a MySpace page, complete with 1,200 friends – of which only six he knows for real. Adrian, as we can well imagine, does much of his social networking via the web.

Having made these introductions, Kwame pulls us out of the story a bit to give a quick background:

The very first wave of online social networks were news groups and message boards – essentially people who gathered around specific topics and issues. It is safe to say that in its initial incarnation, the web was a essentially one big social network. It connected people – much as the fires of old – but this time we could do it all sitting down, no walking around from fire to fire!

Then someone figured out that the web was connecting us all – and we were going crazy with it… So what now? Well, how about telling everyone that they’re connected (even though we already were). So we got people telling us about six degrees of separation and then came the second wave of social networking, as people were reminded that they could make new friends through old friends… and hence the birth of online social networking as we now know it (Friendster, Orkut, hi5)…

The third wave is where are currently at – as online social networks introduced tools and intelligence to make the user experience more immersive and meaningful… Suddenly we’re empowered with tools to capitalise your connections… Take MySpace, which allowed us to share music… Then along comes Facebook with a plethora of tools – and we can do everything from share books online to waging war on the Sith or Werewolves – all while growing our social network.

Coming back to our story – what happens next? Well, Adrian, geek that he is, joins up on Friendster, Orkut and hi5, makes two real friends and begins his journey…

Meanwhile, Ibrahim is also social networking – only he’s on a boat headed to a small island off the coast of Algeria… HIS social network comprises his fellow boat passengers… maybe he exchanges numbers with some of them, and they become part of his network.

Even as Ibrahim grows his network, adding more names to his mobile phonebook, Adrian starts growing and consolidating HIS network… Some of his MySpace friends become his mobile phone mates in a migration from his contacts on MySpace his phone, where they become more real and tangible.

Now remember, Adrian comes from a network computing environment, while Ibrahim has never owned a PC. Yet they are both coming to the same place – they are both adding names and contacts to their mobile phone book and thus growing their Mobile Social Network.

So, what Kwame is telling us, the REAL social network is your mobile phone book; this is the real entry point to mobile social networking. It’s only natural that mob social networking become an extension of online social networking – after all, at the end of the day, we’re all eventually trying to get people into our phone books…

Here’s where things get really interesting – especially for the uber geeks amongst us (those who’ve gazed at a pretty girl from afar, but never had the gumption to walk up and ask her for her number!).

According to Kwame, the next step in the evolution from mobile phones is the mobile computer (today’s fancy mobile phone, which does everything from control your computer remotely, to take movies and pictures, surf the web, GPS maps, messaging to good old fashioned phone calls (not to mention, video calling).

And the question that faces us now is, how will this device change our world?

Now we’ve established through Adrian and Ibrahim that there are two ways to grow one’s social network (with an eye to adding names to our phone book): online social networking and real life physical interaction.

So what’s the killer app? Well, one that marries the two…. Crossing web and mobile data and allowing it to integrate with “real life”.

Kwame explains with another story (one that most of us have experienced).

A few years back, Kwame was in New York, waiting for the subway train. Also on the platform was a truly beautiful girl, checking out something on her mobile. Now if Kwame had some way of “broadcasting” his identity the way one can on the web….

Unfortunately, with the girl in the station, he had no way of interacting – short of his physical appearance.

So how to change that… ideally, he says, it would be some way broadcasting one’s identity – like an “augmented reality” where you could put on a pair of goggles and see the world with virtual info superimposed over the person (“This is Kwame, Portuguese, single and into augmented reality…”).

It’s almost as if we have a cube surrounding us, and when we walk around, our cubes intersect with others, which allows us to access info about each other…. So if two folks are sitting together – both have pics in their phones – while they may never know each other and have no way of catalysing that serendipity of sitting together – in this scenarios, perhaps they could interact virtually, collect info virtually and then unravel that at the end of the day.

Kwame’s all about taking virtual interaction to new level… He talks about an idea he had where a couple both buy these dolls. One touches, say, the arm on his doll… the other can tell cause her dolls arm looks like it’s being touched (kind of like the HugShirt, right?)

So he’s thinking of ways to do exactly that, to augment our identities so that people can tell stuff about us just from looking at us.

Our society no longer has just the one fire – now there hundreds, thousands, millions…. the fires constantly shift and communication has changed and changes the way we act, speak, flirt. Take for example Flirtomatic (a cross platform flirting service developed by Fjord and now, incidentally, also the UK’s largest virtual flower delivery service!). Check it out at www.flirtomatic.com.

The new virtual web is 24-7, but digital living begins with physical living…. So, Kwame concludes, the real mobile network still centres on real life.

If interested in some of this stuff, check out the Fjord website as well at www.fjord.co.uk.

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