Hi folks,
I took part in 2 panel discussions last week – one of which was for the mobile social networking world forum on Day 1, and one for the main social networking world forum on Day 2.
I thought i’d focus this blog post on my thoughts following the first one. The topic of convo at this first session was fittingly titled: Mobile social start ups versus large web social networks. Presumably, WAYN was speaking on behalf of the latter, given that 95%+ of our traffic is currently online still. For those interested, you can check out the mobile version of WAYN at http://m.wayn.com which is available from any handset.
On the panel, I was joined by:
Stephanie Hoffman – CEO if aka-aki – a fast growing location based mobile social network, based in Germany
and Andrew Weinreich – CEO of meetMoi, a fast growing location based mobile dating service, based in the US
We had an interesting debate about whether mobile location based social networks would be able to compete with the big boys, particularly given that Google have made a big play into this space following it’s recent launch of Latitude and the fact that Facebook is likely to upgrade its mobile service to be location-enabled, imminently.
By the looks of things, both companies are doing well to cement their positions within their niche markets and both have a different focus, not only from each other and us, but also from Google and Facebook. Although one could argue that Google could destroy the market very easily, the evolving view seems more that they need enablers to their technology and platform as much as we need them. The same applies to Facebook. Every day, I see a fresh announcement of yet another location based app that is integrated with Facebook connect, and now that Apple and Facebook have joined forces on that front, get ready for a flurry of facebook connect enabled iphone apps on the horizon.
Limbo is one of the largest and fastest growing, which announced only today that their app now supports facebook connect and that you can even view your facebook friends’ location using their app without having to be a member of Limbo. The app is free and I am sure there will be many more to follow…
Like many of these apps, we see the focus being more on the “so what?” once you have location based services enabled. I agree 100% with a good friend of mine Andy Scott, Founder and CEO of Rummble – a leading mobile location based service that focuses on finding you the people and places around you that you like, who recently blogged about this subject, and who recognized that basic location aware offerings will become commoditised and it is the services or utilities that this enables that is of most interest.
Here at WAYN we believe that being able to see who’s around and what’s around is the foundation blocks but it is not the reason that people will use mobile location based services or any web-based social network for that matter. They will, however, use such services to fulfill a need, whether it be dating, meeting new people, finding out where the best Indian curry within 1km is, based on recommendations from their friends, and more. We are focusing on one of those needs in particular when we re-launch our offering later in the Spring, and hope to harness the power of mobile, through apps and the like, to deliver this particular utility in its ultimate form. Whether we get it right or not is another matter, but I do believe that the opportunities to carve out a useful niche in the mobile social networking arena still exist, and there is yet another gold rush approach to building iPhone apps to be distributed on iTunes.
I look forward to announcing more in due course but in the meantime, do let us know if you have any feedback on what you think WAYN should focus on if it were to be fully location enabled on the site and ofcourse eventually on every handset 
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