Signal to Noise

Cell Phone, meet Social Network. Social Network, meet Cell Phone.

My thesis is of the moment is this: Cell phones are going to become the dominant means of social networking. They’re already the best tool for it and the only reason PCs are dominant in the social net arena is because PCs have always been OPEN ENOUGH to participate social nets in a meaningful way. Cell phones haven’t been.
Today I’m thinking about the nexus of mobility, identity management, and social networking.
Identity management is the art of controlling your appearance on or more networking environments and social networking is using multimedia content to facilitate human communication using a network. And the ultimate meeting point of these two concepts–identity management and socialization–is the mobile device. Ie. your cell phone. Why? Because you carry it with you at all times and because it’s powerful enough to handle common video and audio content swiftly and easily.

Problem is, cell phones have never been conducive to identity management because they’ve always been controlled by the unimaginary bureaucracy of the big carriers. Same with social networking: it just don’t happen on cell phones. It’s just too hard to manage identity and share in the great social experiment with a personal wireless phone–this despite them being the best tool for the job.

But this is about to change, bigtime. Keep reading.

New services leverage IP comms to converge your identity, social media, and mobility (startups are doing it because your cell phone company refuses to).

With identity management, you’ve got presentation-related features like Caller ID and can perform mobility tricks like hiding your location (a la TalkPlus) in order to make your cell phone appear as though it’s your home phone, and so on. Identity also consists of features that have to do with reachability–how reachable are you? Where? When? These of course are facilitated by companies like Grand Central’s flexible call-handling service and Iotum‘s TalkNow product for Blackberry users. So that’s identity. Verizon and AT&T won’t do this stuff and don’t talk about ever doing it. But it’s valuable stuff. Reachability and identity are valuable to consumers, but it’s not going to get capitalized by the “big boys”, because they aren’t good at it and may even see this stuff as a threat to their business. The main end-user control point for next-generation services like this is, you guessed it, the CELL PHONE.

Social networking is a broader concept than identity. It is going to become very hot on cell phones, too. Today with social networking, you have large communities of users (the Internet itself is a huge social networking experiment) sharing content, democratizing cultural opinion, rewarding the good things in the social network while punishing the bad ones, and sharing freely of their own social media. Examples include YouTube, MySpace, Second Life, and to a lesser extent, Skype. The whole point of social networking is to deconstruct the app cloud, reducing its complexity to the extent that human interaction just occurs naturally and easily within a framework that isn’t distracting or even visible to the participating humans. That is to say, the actions we want to accomplish while socializing–sharing media and voting with our feet–can happen unhindered by the infrastructure underneath it all. MySpace has had a ton of success with this (they’ve become the single most trafficked site on the Net). Cell carriers have not–because they’re not about reducing complexity or making the cloud invisible.
You’d think that your cell phone carriers would realize how much stands to be gained by embracing social networking through their infrastructure, allowing users to generate and consume content using the smarts on the endpoint device to make it all easy. Instead, the old guard of media giants (Sony, BMG, etc.) have convinced the cell carriers that paying fees to download crummy 30-second VCAST streams is a better use of their 3G infrastructure than actually empowering their subscribers to do what they want to do. So, the cell players’ whole system is kind of like a gimpy, retarded social network that’s hard to use. Hence, nobody uses their cell phone for social networking above and beyond pay-per-use SMS messages and (crummy) photo e-mailing (which by the way doesn’t always work quite right when sending media messages between carriers). Come on AT&T (and Verizon), you know these offerings SUCK, and your customers are going to know it very soon too.

Because the new kids on the block are waiting in the wings to empower YOUR customers using their CELL PHONES.

So the Cell Phone is the NEXUS of mobility, identity, and social networking.

The guys who’ve arrived at the wireless phone nexus already are Grand Central, Vringo, and TalkPlus.

I was talking to Craig Walker, CEO of Grand Central, a service which increases reachability and identity management capabilities for its users. Craig’s service is largely geared around telephony features for controlling identity characteristics (caller ID, disposable numbers, etc.) and reachability (find me / follow me across multiple transports, etc.). But despite GC’s roots in telephony, these guys still GET and EMBRACE mobile social networking and media-sharing concepts. Perhaps that’s why Grand Central lets you CREATE and UPLOAD your own ringback tones from your iTunes library. How cool is THAT? That’s a baby step towards mature social networking on your mobile device. The next step is to use the cell phone, and not the PC, as the control point for on-demand media sharing.

And that’s an important step. Right now, people take lots of pictures with their camera phones, but it’s a pain to get that photographic content out of the cell phone and into a social networking environment, because the cellphone itself isn’t connected to a social network. Instead, you have to download the stuff from your phone to your PC, log into MySpace or YouTube, upload it, etc. It’s a big pain, and that’s why the majority of people just let their cell phone snapshots and home videos pile up on their camera phone and gather virtual dust. But this is going to change soon. Enter Vringo.

Vringo is a company that makes a piece of software that lets you create visual ringtones (videos that appear during the ring period of an incoming call) and then share them using a social networking apparatus not unlike Mynumo–except that Vringo has implemented the social network directly on the phone itself. Very cool. You can shoot your videos and share them as ring tones WITHOUT ever sitting down in front of a PC. Benjamin from Vringo explained to me how the system works.

I shoot a video (or download one to my phone from Vringo) and then set it as a ring tone. I can have specific ring tones for specific callers–for example a Switchfoot video for my kids, a Toby Keith video for my mom, and maybe a Nirvana video for the significant other. I can also establish a default video ring tone. Again these are on outgoing calls and the videos play on the RECIPIENT’s phone, not mine. 2.0. Social media. All on the endpoint device. Very cool. So with Vringo, now I have a customizable video avatar just like I do on a more traditional computer-endpoint social network. Only now, the social network is more relevant to me because it’s in my pocket wherever I go. It’s also more usable because I don’t have to sit in front of my Mac or PC to access the social cloud.

To take that concept a step further, if we integrate other existing social media and identity concepts–like avatars, user-supplied content, “hot or not” democratization, and screen names–and put them into the world of SMS and cell phone media sharing, we can really empower users and social nets will explode, making today’s MySpace look like a relatively tame experiment. Mobility makes it easer to use social networks, and necessitates the need for identity tools. The result? A new market is born out of need: with mobility, a content-driven social net market appears, and a need-driven identity market appears. So these new players are WAY ahead of the big carriers’ thinking on this stuff.

But why didn’t social nets appear on phones BEFORE they appeared on PCs?

None of this stuff has ever come from the big carriers because they can’t figure out how to monetize it. AT&T’s monolithic “feature belligerence” has created a gaping niche that guys like Craig from Grand Central, Benjamin from Vringo, and John Todd of TalkPlus are jumping headfirst into. Where the big boys see a profit gap, the new guys see an opportunity.

And it’s a huge opportunity. The cell phone/personal media device is the last stop for social networks–the last frontier for media-driven leisure networking. And the reason it’s the last stop, not the first (that was the PC), is two fold: cell infrastructure has only recently been able to support media-rich applications, and cell infrastructure has always been closed to third parties who didn’t have names like Sony and Disney. With the IP transport, that has changed dramatically. With Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Linux-based phones gaining in popularity, the availability of down-to-earth development tools opens the door to the cell cloud to people with good ideas–folks like Craig, John, and Benjamin–instead of those people who long ago abandoned innovation and consumer value creation: folks like the big media blue chippers and cell phone carriers.