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Social Networking: Is There a Market? Next Steps? Is it Meetro?
We have seen web-based applications/sites like LinkedIn, MySpace and Friendster become quite popular and expand the average view of what exactly networking is and how to organize a business/social network. Now, we see a Chicago based company release a new social networking application that continues to push the envelope of “connections”.
The application is called Meetro and it is essentially a location based instant messenger that also consolidates AIM and ICQ. It locates mobile users via wi-fi nodes and allows landline users to enter their address (or a close one for privacy, if at home). Users are then shown in the window sorted by distance from you. With this initial version the company is looking for critical mass, but there will be filtering by keywords, demographics and profiles soon.
I have used it for a few weeks in Chicago to try it out and test the experience. It is kind of neat to be sitting in a coffee house or at the airport and find someone else close by with common interests. It would be nice to be able to integrate LinkedIn into Meetro, but it is a really good start.
What do you think about the program and where mobile social networking will go in the future? Is there a market for social networking applications?
At least in the few private studies I’ve seen on beta applications, “social” applications that use cell-id seem to work better for buddy alerts for close friends than necessarily for extended networks, random meets or business networking. The reasoning seems to be that people are generally not willing to traverse the distance of a cell-id (even in the city center) or take the extra step of trying to find who is actually close to them unless they already have a close personal connection.
GPS is an option. However, the urban-canyon effect and lack of indoor locations (until low frequency receivers are adopted) again limit the usefulness of non-buddy alert social applications.
With that said, wi-fi is not commonplace on phones and thus has its own limitations. The one thing wi-fi does do is allows a system to more accurately (at least for now) determine location – often simply showing people that are on the same access point (e.g. in a coffee house).
Do you think consumers are willing to sign up for another network or will any successful mobile social application have to tie in Yahoo, MSN, AIM, Friendster, LinkedIn, etc.?
Reading this article makes me realize what a primitive state consumer technology is still in. I’ve just read an article from the Joel on Software site talking about leaky abstractions (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html) and that is exactly what we have here. An abstraction is an simplified concept that wraps around how something really works and hides the details. Like when you drive your car, you have to know what all the controls do, but not how an engine works. An abstraction leaks when you have to understand what is going on behind the scenes. Like if your car runs out of gas, you have to know that the engine needs gas and what to do about it. Implementation details such as having a gps or wi-fi signal that can carry your signal are not things a consumer should have to deal with when this technology matures. People shouldn’t have to know where cell phone towers are either. These are implementation details, and consumers just want to use a service with a abstraction that makes sense to them.
The idea of meta data from the internet being mapped to objects in the real world is kind of frightening, and has much larger implications than finding out the hobbies of the person next to you on a train. This will be a fun one for someone to use for evil.
[…] The acquisition of Android continues a line of recent purchases such as Dodgeball - a mobile social-networking application, Keyhole – map display technology. When added to this the recent rumored interest in Meetro – location based instant messenger and a Google nationwide Wi-Fi network, the possibilities for Google’s growth get quite interesting. […]
[…] The discussion of a Google IM began last year with an examination of Google’s early desktop search program that contained a protocol named ‘google_im://’. The buzz grew even louder in July of 2005 when Google made public steps into the IM market with the acquisition of Picasa. More recently, a rumor surfaced that Google was considering an acquisition of the location based instant messenger/consolidator Meetro, which has since turned out not to be true. […]