The future of Social Networks is mobile ...

This is a quote from Raymond Spanjard from Hyves speaking at PICNIC07. I picked this up thanks to Tom Hume's excellent blog, where he liveblogged the sharing your life panel discussion.


It would appear that Google having today bought Zingku agree, at least in part that mobile will be an important part of Social Networking (but their first experiment with Dodgeball did not bear fruit). Commentary on the acquisition here. There's been speculation-a-plenty about what Google were going to do about the "Facebook" problem which is already mobilised (Orkut is undergoing a facelift and this may be an addition that brings in the mobile side).

What I find interesting is the continuing trend of sharing media content between your social network. Social networks are primarily about communication but this is now being expanded to include content sharing (photos/music/video etc). This is the right way round in my opinion , communication first, then content.

From my own experience this is the main reason why I've drifted away from the personal dashboards (netvibes, igoogle, myYahoo etc..) towards the Social networking sites as my default browser homepage (although they're still useful).

Facebook / Bebo are good examples of this. You get your social network in place and start communicating, then you share fun and useful content through that network. The dashboard engines were quick to pick up on this (Pageflakes added the sharing-content option very early on) but they are still coming from a content-based approach rather than a communication-based starting point ie. get your content in place then start sharing it.

I expect we'll see more video/audio/photo/gaming-sharing functionalities appear in the (mobile) and social networking services in the very near future.