Social networking is now synonymous with the wireless user experience–no other service better leverages the platform’s signature combination of mobility, connectivity and location-specific accessibility. Research firm comScore reports that in April 2010, 69.6 million U.S. mobile subscribers accessed an application on their phone, an increase of 28 percent from the previous year–no app segment experienced more substantial growth during the period than mobile social networking, which grew 240 percent year-over-year to 14.5 million users. ComScore adds that social networking also ranked as the fastest-growing category accessed via the mobile browser, surging 90 percent over the previous year to close in on 30 million users.
The increase in mobile social networking users correlates with an expanding legion of social media services–competition is especially fierce in the geo-social segment, where startups including Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite and Booyah are all vying for supremacy. Expect even more services to follow, from established players and upstarts alike. Here are five mobile social networks to watch in the months ahead.
Facebook
The standard by which all other mobile social networks are judged. The numbers speak for themselves: Facebook users worldwide are closing in on the 500 million mark, up from 200 million users just 15 months ago, with about 30 percent accessing the service via mobile device each month. That percentage grows substantially within the smartphone segment: In June 2010, research firm The Nielsen Company said 39 percent of all smartphone owners use the Facebook social networking application every month, adding it is the most popular app on iPhone (used by 58 percent of consumers) and BlackBerry (39 percent), as well as the second most popular on Android (51 percent).
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But to retain its sizable advantage over the competition, Facebook must continue to innovate and expand. With location-based mobile social networks like Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt growing by leaps and bounds, look for Facebook to introduce its own geo-social services in the near future–rumors abound, with multiple reports indicating the company will soon integrate location tagging into users’ status updates. Another possible clue to its plans: Earlier this month, Facebook acquired social travel startup Nextstop, which enables users to create and share vacation guides and tourist recommendations.
With feature phones still making up the vast majority of the international wireless market, Facebook is also expanding beyond smartphones with the May introduction of 0.facebook.com, a new mobile site optimized for a speedier, more efficient user experience across mass-market devices. Targeted for consumers in developing nations, 0.facebook.com retains vital social networking features and eliminates components that complicate and slow down the process–users can still update their status, view their News Feed, comment on posts and send and reply to messages, but should they choose to view photos, data fees will apply.
Facebook’s biggest threat? Facebook itself. Any change to the service inevitably triggers backlash from a small but vocal minority of users. Mounting concerns over its approach to privacy controls even prompted a grass-roots protest calling for members to abandon ship, but May 31′s Quit Facebook Day turned out to be a bust–only about 31,000 users pledged to delete their accounts. Even so, Facebook introduced new, simplified controls promising to help users better understand what kind of information they’re choosing to share. The site has weathered other controversies along the way, and still it continues to grow. For now, Facebook remains too powerful, too entrenched–and for most users, too addictive–to simply fade away.
Twitter
Four years after it first launched, Twitter continues to grow–in mid-April, co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone announced the microblogging service now adds 300,000 new users a day and generates more than 65 million tweets daily, translating to about 750 tweets sent each second. Usage scaled new peaks this summer, reaching a record-breaking 3,085 tweets per second after the Los Angeles Lakers wrapped up the 2010 NBA Championship on June 17. Central to Twitter’s growth is its increasing popularity among mobile subscribers: According to a recent study issued by research firm Compete, 33 percent of smartphone Twitter users primarily send tweets via their handsets, and 33 percent of these consumers prefer to read tweets on their phone. In interviews, Williams has touted the mobile platform’s critical importance to Twitter’s future, stating “We believe we can enhance people’s lives on the move” and adding that tweets are confined to 140 characters expressly to fit into the body of one text message.
No less important, Twitter also continues to evolve, making a number of acquisitions in an effort to expand and improve its platform. In April, Twitter scooped up Atebits, developer of the Tweetie client for iPhone (since renamed Twitter for iPhone) as well as messaging infrastructure provider Cloudhopper–two months later, it purchased Smallthought Systems, developer of the Trendly analytics service. The deals have nevertheless fueled concern among Twitter developer partners who fear the company will now build more applications in-house or purchase services that bolster its overall vision, in the process making third-party apps obsolete. Williams did little to assuage those concerns, telling The New York Times Twitter will continue to build apps and features it needs, even if third-party developers already provide them, and added that Twitter bought search solutions provider Summize in 2008 because it realized it needed a search engine. “There could be other stuff like that, that completes the platform and makes it better,” Williams said. “Since we’re still evolving, that may happen more.”
Twitter is also making money, introducing Promoted Tweets in mid-April. The initiative features ads that show up when users search for keywords tied to advertiser campaigns–from there, Twitter will eventually insert user-relevant promotional posts into the Twitter stream based on metrics like geographic location or shared interests among followers. Brands including Starbucks, Best Buy, Virgin America and Bravo have already signed on. A new digital commerce service, Earlybird Exclusive Offers, followed in early July, promising time-sensitive deals to users who follow the @earlybird tweet stream. According to Twitter, @earlybird deals are created expressly for the Twitter community; advertiser partners will determine the terms of each promotion, including availability, amount and price, with Twitter earning a cut of resulting revenues. The concept parallels social commerce services like Groupon and Woot, which also offer limited-time deals to registered consumers–Twitter suggests future evolutions of @earlybird could include location-sensitive offers as well as bargains tied to specific merchandise categories, like fashion or music.
Twitter’s ongoing transformation poses one major question: Is it still a social network? Co-founder Stone argues otherwise. “That’s been a myth since the beginning,” he said during an appearance at June’s World Innovation Forum. “We’re much more like an information network or a source of news.” Regardless of how you define it, one thing’s clear: Twitter is redefining how the world communicates.
Foursquare
Introduced in March 2009, Foursquare is now synonymous with the fast-growing location-based mobile social networking segment. Essentially a videogame translated from the virtual realm to the real world, Foursquare awards users points, badges and “mayor” status for frequenting local nightspots and restaurants, also sharing their whereabouts with friends via platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Research firm RJMetrics calculates that Foursquare surpassed the 2 million user count in early July–the startup recently said it’s adding new users at a rate of about 10,000 a day across device platforms including iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, webOS and Windows Mobile. In late June, Foursquare closed a Series B venture financing round valued at $20 million.
Earlier this year, rumors indicated Foursquare was in serious acquisition talks with both Facebook and Yahoo, but for now the startup remains independent. Unlike rival social networks that have struggled to identify and formulate a workable revenue model, Foursquare’s value proposition is crystal clear–its future lies in location-specific advertising, and the firm already boasts marketing partnerships with brands including Starbucks, Zagat’s and The New York Times Company.
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Foursquare’s biggest challenge is its own momentum: The service is growing so fast that the company is struggling to keep up, and advertising agencies say it’s increasingly difficult to get execs to respond to partnership requests. Foursquare admits it has struggled to scale its business, but Ben Horowitz–co-founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which led the recent funding round–remains convinced of the startup’s long-term viability. “This is a model that users and businesses love,” Horowitz told The Wall Street Journal. “It will monetize better than any social networking product out there.”
Google Me
You’re absolutely correct–there is no mobile social network called Google Me. At least not yet. But it’s coming. Google’s focus on location-specific services–and the advertising revenues that come with them–makes it inevitable.
Rumors about the so-called Google Me project first surfaced in late June, when Digg founder Kevin Rose posted a now-deleted Twitter message reading “Ok, umm, huge rumor: Google to launch Facebook competitor very soon ‘Google Me,’ very credible source.” Early Facebook exec Adam D’Angelo–co-founder of Q&A search solution Quora–later corroborated Rose’s tweet, explaining Google “realized that Buzz wasn’t enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network. They are modeling it off of Facebook. Unlike previous attempts (before Buzz at least), this is a high-priority project within Google. They had assumed that Facebook’s growth would slow as it grew, and that Facebook wouldn’t be able to have too much leverage over them, but then it just didn’t stop, and now they are really scared.” Google execs have since issued a series of non-denials, further igniting industry speculation on what’s to come.
As D’Angelo points out, Google is no stranger to social networking. The aforementioned Google Buzz launched in February 2010–the handset-optimized version of the service integrates Gmail with social networking features. “Google Buzz lets you share Web links, photos, videos and more with those who are important to you,” wrote Google Mobile product manager Punit Singh Soni on the Official Google Mobile Blog. “Rather than simply creating a mobile version of Buzz, we decided to take advantage of the unique features of a mobile device–in particular, location.” Google Buzz for mobile allows users to post status updates and comments directly from their smartphones, additionally using location to identify places in the immediate vicinity; users can select those sites to add as tags to their posts, or read what others have posted about a particular landmark.
Prior to Buzz, Google entered location-based social networking with Latitude, a friend-finder solution introduced in early 2009. More than a million mobile subscribers signed up in the first week, and in May 2010, Google said the service now tops 3 million active users, adding that more than 8 million users have signed up since the solution went live. Despite the attention heaped on rivals like Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt, Latitude continues to grow 30 percent month-over-month, with over 10 percent of Android smartphone owners now using the service. Those numbers alone make it clear that when (not if) Google gets serious about social networking, it’s going to pose a serious threat.
MySpace
MySpace is dead. Long live MySpace? Five years after media giant News Corp. acquired the once-booming social network for $580 million, MySpace now lags far behind rivals Facebook and Twitter–co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe exited in April 2009, his replacement Owen Van Natta stepped down less than a year later, and in June 2010, co-president Jason Hirschhorn announced his resignation just four months after he and co-president Mike Jones took the reins. Despite the upheaval, News Corp. digital chief Jonathan Miller recently squashed rumors that MySpace is up for sale, dismissing reports as “fabrications”–he said plans instead call for a relaunch later this year, with an emphasis on multimedia content like music.
What makes MySpace worth watching is its potential for reinvention–either News Corp. will resuscitate the brand or kill it off for good. No social network has ever successfully rebounded once it hit the skids (consider Friendster or Bebo, the latter sold by AOL for pennies on the dollar earlier this summer). But no other social network is owned by a company with the reach and scope of News Corp., either. Insider buzz indicate that plans call for an all-you-can-eat streaming subscription music service in collaboration with major labels Universal, Sony, Warner and EMI. MySpace is also exploring options to replace a $900 million search advertising deal with Google, set to expire in August–in addition to negotiating a new partnership with Google, NewsCorp. is reportedly in talks with Microsoft and Yahoo as well.
In the meantime, MySpace is attempting to improve its visibility on the mobile platform. In mid-May, it released new software development kits enabling developers to integrate social networking tools into their iPhone and Android applications. During a recent interview with FierceMobileContent, MySpace Mobile GM and VP of product and business development Bjorn Laurin said the service’s userbase is increasingly mobile–interaction with the site via Android smartphones increased 230 percent over the last 12 months, and more than 30 percent of all MySpace traffic now originates via mobile device. “We’re going to build our own mobile applications on these SDKs,” Laurin said. “There’s so much stuff you can do with this–the list is as long as possible.” Stay tuned.
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