Georg Cockburn

I’ve really noticed the relevance of mobile social networks in the speeches at this year’s CHI in Florence, Italy.

I’ve always been on an upbeat note about mobile social networks, but here more than before, there have been some great papers on this topic, which all really show where all this can be heading. The only issue is that there just isn’t the killer-app out there yet in order to reach the critical mass: As long as there’s no one running the same social network app around me it doesn’t make any sense at all to me, and in turn I don’t run it either.

As Louise Barkhouus, Barry Brown, Marek Bell, Scott Sherwood, Malcolm Hall, Matthew Chalmers from San Diego and Glasgow point out in their study “Connecto”, the demand really would be there. They developed a location-aware system for mobile phones, which they then tested on a group of students and young adults in Glasgow, Scotland. People could leave status-messages as in Twitter and this information was enriched automatically by their location using triangulation and transferred to their friends mobiles. The group soon developed a high usage of this system. There doesn’t seem to be anything online concerning “Connecto” right now, but if possible, I’ll get back to you soon to write more on this interesting research.

There’s also an article on Techcrunch today, that I would recommend reading about a possible first step in this direction with an iPhone-only social network: in his article “I Saw The Future Of Social Networking The Other Day” Michael Arrington writes about a still anonymous start-up.

And then don’t forget Aka-Aki. The Berlin, Germany based project looks really promising, there’s just the chicken and hen problem. As long as the critical mass isn’t reached, they’ll have a hard time. Also read more on this topic in one of my recent articles “Mobile Touchpoints”.