Mobile Discontent

Was at the MoCollywood conference yesterday, talking about Mobile rich media content. Headlining the acts was Danah Boyd, talking about Social Networks. It was interesting to hear her speak in the flesh (as it were), but my strong impression from this was that - I'm afraid to say - most of what needs to be said about SocNets has been said already - or at least nothing new was said. (Here is another precis)

(Note - I've written a short postscript at the bottom re this)

In the various Q&A we pushed the talk more towards mobile issues, but my impression was that Danah has no more clues about how mobile social networking will actually pan out than anybody else there. What was most useful (in my opinion) was a question in a subsequent session about "Lessons you don't want to repeat" from web based SocNets:

- do what your users want, not what you want
- technical scalability is a big issue, prepare for it from the get-go
- SocNets grow organically using their own dynamics - force growing them via advertising etc can change the culture and spoil it for everyone else.

By the way - note to our US brothers - "Mobil" is a petrochemical company, Mobile - (pronounced like "style") is a small portable phone

Also talking was Richard Saggers of Vodafone - his talk was fairly bland, lots of generic assertions of the value of mobile media and that Advertising would in time flock to it. Where it perked up was in the Q&A session, where Richard was much more specific about the need for the industry to create standards for content to be published much more easily. This chimes a lot with what we know from other work we are doing. Richard painted a picture of what the London 2012 Olympics would be like with a lot of the functionality we talk about today, and the thought that came into my mind was that this was was about the timescale it would take for all this to happen

Next up was M:Metrics' Paul Goode who gave a good "back to the future talk" - pretty much putting the numbers to Richard's Q&A - in other words the market is small, fast growing in parts, but is ultimately dependent on larger and slower trends such as rate of device replacement, lag factors in the move of funding from todays' media to new media formats etc. I'm not doing his talk justice, but I will put up a few of his stats now.

Talk of the day for me was by The Institute for the Future 's Jane McGonigal, who talked about emerging trends in the New Media space. Her hypothesis is that the in-game world is actually more interesting and desirable that reality, so there will be a very fertile area of apps that make reality look more like games - importing some of the mechanisms into "real world" services was one approach, but more enticing were the thoughts around helping to make reality look more like games.

An aside to the MoCollywood guys - it was quite a "user unfriendly" website design to get to the data - very glitzy guys, but lousy functionality - very Web 1.0 stuff - and it was very hard (ie impossible) to find the venue location on a mobile web search .

Postscript: re-reading my post it could be taken to mean that there is nothing new to learn about Social Nets in the future. What I meant to say is that nothing was said about the current services, and lessons to be drawn from them, that one would not have already picked up by a bit of reading on the Web. An amusing aside was that Danah kicked off with "in jargon" words like Social Graph etc but rapidly reverted to words like "network", "directory" etc