MySpace In My Pocket

A much anticipated event has had the industry rags chattering about a celebrity marriage between MySpace and a mystery mobile suitor for a while now. "Can you imagine it? The young and sexy MySpace marrying a fat old rich conservative Telco? Who could it be?". The gossip was great. MySpace had already dated some baby cellco's for a while. Finally rumour was buried; Myspace and Cingular announced officially their wedding to other with launch of the MySpace Mobile product. (Could rumour suggest an eventual threesome with Apple?...)

Well luckily for the OReilly readers we already have secured one of the people who was responsible for the matchmaking, Jason Ling, Head of Mobile at MySpace to come and tell us as it really is at OReilly's Emerging Telephony conference. Jason Ling, Head of Mobile, Myspace will tell us what happens when you take a social network media platform like MySpace and glue it to the mobile in the pockets of the MySpace audience. MySpace I am sure sees a better experience for its customers and the operators see something else to tie down and add to the ARPU of their otherwise churning customers. Or am I being too predictably rash and cynical here? I think I am if I dig deeply into my heart.

MySpace is already being claimed to be a powerful form of communication between like minded people in clustered social networks. The communication is spam free as the audience is most definitely young enough to not need Viagra, Re-financing or Phentermine. A lot of people "don't get MySpace" but then again an alarmingly large number quite clearly do. MySpace users are said to be abandoning email in favour of mediating via their MySpace presence on the web and I look forward to how they start to (or don't) mix the modalities of communication that each presents. Mobility has a context of its own and quite different to how you sit and use a browser. A lot of the dead mobile community startups on the roadside attest to the rash moving of internet propositions to the handset with "the devil may care" attitudes. If indeed this demographic are using MySpace as a communication channel then I would love to see how they take the mobility aspect and integrate it into their lives. Good or bad, whatever we learn will only make us stronger and create better, more useful, mobile services. Personally I am really hoping that it does take off. Change is a good thing.

Related to the Myspace talk will be other social technology talks at the Etel conference. Kaliya Hamlin will talk about the way that Portable Identity schemes will need to cross between different types of channels and France Telecom Orange R+D will talk about how they are innovating new types of network infrastructure to support social networks at the network layer. This makes great sense - since what most communication networks do well is support the maintenance of social networks (when you call a friend you maintain that relationship.) Lee Dyburgh goes one further in his talk and sees how we can build applications on these advanced networks to broker introductions and find the right people - very useful in large corporate settings as it would be in more domestic settings.

Darwin had a good point. You've gotta keep trying the combinations. It'll eventually only make everything stronger.

(and if your the sort of person who see's opportunity in 1.6 billion telephones as well as the 600 million pc's out there then come register for Emerging Telephony with this discount code etel07radar)