Social networking is the new address book

Social networking was at the forefront of discussion in Barcelona. Announcements from the show included a raft of application development plans from MySpace to bring its social platform to S60 and Palm's upcoming webOS, noise from Ericsson to provide back-end support for the social graph, and strategy shifts from Nokia and Sony Ericsson, centring user's devices around the social network. Then there was the INQ1, winning the 'Best Mobile Handset' category at the GSMA Global Mobile Awards, a device built with Facebook networking in mind. Google's 'Latitude' stole the pre-show social buzz and, amid some concerns for privacy, there were encouraging notions that social services are successfully pushing in this direction. A key tenet of socio-location data is that a user can know what his or her friends are doing, and where. Yet, for content providers and advertisers alike, being able to map the social graph has implications far beyond knowing where your friends are. So far only one social network has tackled this head-on, the US-based Loopt, but has yet to see staggering success to the tune of Facebook or MySpace. Turning to the vendors, Sony Ericsson's 'Entertainment Unlimited' strategy - announced at the show - highlights the importance of social networking, not just as a function of the phone, but as an intrinsic service that reflects the personal and spontaneous nature of social updates. Sony Ericsson should be in the enviable position of being able to leverage the Walkman and Cybershot brands to aid its growth in this area, but we have yet to see any serious push into content sharing. Nokia's Ovi finds itself in a similar position and again, hinted at social-device integration with a new (but still lukewarm) version of Contacts on Ovi. On a fundamental level, social networks are the new address book and we expect to see a shift towards this mentality in the mobile OS, both as users demand the integration of their existing services and as developers embrace the wider social graph through OpenID and media content-centric hubs.

(This article is part of a series of follow-ups on Mobile World Congress 2009 from the GSMA Intelligence team.)