Nokia’s Upcoming Launch of Mobile Social Networking

Younghee Jung and Per Pers­son gave an inter­est­ing lec­ture on Fri­day 8/4/05 about mobile social net­work­ing, from the Nokia stand­point, at Stan­ford, avail­able online through video here (you may have to reg­is­ter online first). John Kern sum­ma­rizes the topic of the lec­ture well:

This research project con­sid­ered how a mobile phone could be used to
aug­ment face-to-face con­ver­sa­tion. How can one express some pub­lic
infor­ma­tion about your­self to oth­ers? What if you could retrieve some
infor­ma­tion about your shared social network?

From the Stan­ford syn­op­sis:

Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion prod­ucts and appli­ca­tions have great influ­ences on the ways peo­ple behave, per­ceive and con­struct their social iden­tity and rela­tion­ships. On the other hand, users appro­pri­ate com­mu­ni­ca­tion prod­ucts over time to adopt them into their every­day lives. The design of such prod­ucts and appli­ca­tions there­fore entail much more than good usabil­ity at hand: It is about the social
sys­tem that is man­i­fested through user inter­ac­tions enabled by the prod­ucts, and how the com­mu­nity of the users expe­ri­ence the prod­uct over time. This is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant in the domain of mobile social com­put­ing since it is dif­fi­cult to sim­u­late social expe­ri­ences in order to val­i­date the con­cept with users.

Younghee and Per indi­cate that the social net­work­ing appli­ca­tion will be launched in May for Nokia Series 60 phones. The upcom­ing Sen­sor embed­ded appli­ca­tion will allow peo­ple to express them­selves to oth­ers in their prox­im­ity, using DigiDress iden­tity pages.

Nokia tested thor­oughly the social impli­ca­tions of hav­ing dis­cov­er­able iden­ti­ties on mobile phones, in par­tic­u­lar with respect to:

• the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of peo­ple you’d like to meet in a prox­im­ity situation;
• the use of iden­tity infor­ma­tion for break­ing the ice;
• the fur­ther use of the mobile phone for increas­ing inter­ac­tion by shar­ing con­tent, etc.; and,
• the archiv­ing of exchanged iden­ti­ties and instant mes­sag­ing for later recall.

How­ever, the focus groups they ran raised a num­ber of issues, includ­ing reluc­tance to share iden­tity infor­ma­tion in a prox­im­ity dis­cov­er­able sit­u­a­tion, as well as the good point that “if you need an appli­ca­tion to com­mu­ni­cate with oth­ers, you might as well not com­mu­ni­cate at all.” So the appli­ca­tion was sim­pli­fied and dif­fer­ent types of secu­rity fea­tures were built in, in par­tic­u­lar to com­ply with legal and copy­right restrictions.

Herein lies a major dif­fer­ence between the prox­im­ity aspect of phys­i­cal social inter­ac­tions and the cen­tral­ized aspect of online social net­works (LinkedIn, etc.). A great point was raised at the end of the lec­ture by some­one in the audi­ence: future wi-fi and mobile devices will be able to “mash” the inter­net and incor­po­rate cen­tral­ized social net­work­ing (more here), so the “social” safe­guards built into the Sen­sor appli­ca­tion may become a moot point.

Over­all, it will be excit­ing to see this appli­ca­tion in use, although it is heav­ily depen­dent on the pen­e­tra­tion it achieves. In other words, it is of no use if only one per­son in a party has the application.

Then again, achiev­ing pen­e­tra­tion is partly the mar­ket­ing department’s job, right?

Via Russ Beat­tie and John Kern

Tech­no­rati Tags: mobile, social, net­works