Asmallworld.net (ASW), the *exclu­sive* invitation-only social net­work, announced this week that key func­tion­al­i­ties of their plat­form are avail­able for brow­ing on mobile phones.

Link: ASW goes mobile (the link may work for mem­bers only):

“Today (10 May ’05) we proudly present our mobile plat­form. We don’t believe that you will be using this mobile plat­form in the same way as you use the site in gen­eral, but think it is impor­tant that you can reach cer­tain parts of aSmall­World, even when you are on the move. The size of files has been top pri­or­ity to make down­load of pages as quick as pos­si­ble. As most cell phones have reg­u­lar browsers today we have built this in html, which means you can use the mobile plat­form in your reg­u­lar browser. Could be good if you are on a slow con­nec­tion. It works on all hand­helds, Blackberry’s and most new phones. But this is not a wap appli­ca­tion, and won’t work on the phones that only have wap-browsers.”

The news of Google’s acqui­si­tion of Dodge­ball this week and Nokia’s launch
of the Nokia Sen­sor under­stand­ably over­shad­owed ASW’s move to mobile social com­put­ing. The impor­tance of the move shouldn’t be over­looked how­ever, as ASW is reach­ing DLA nir­vana with their part­ner Broad­band Mechan­ics (French Net­flix  Glowria.fr is another client) … (what’s DLA?):

“In many ways the final mile of get­ting dig­i­tal data into and out of the
home may be solved by wire­less tech­nol­ogy. So mobile ser­vices could
also become our main artery onto the Inter­net and world of on-line
media.

It’s obvi­ous that “any­thing, any­time, any­where” means mobil­ity is essential.

Mobile devices will soon be in the hands of over half the world’s
pop­u­la­tion. Inte­grat­ing not only gate­ways, but also mobile dri­ven
appli­ca­tions and ser­vices into DLAs, is going to be a key
dif­fer­en­tia­tor mov­ing forward.

So when you mix peo­ple and social net­work­ing, media and devices,
con­tent, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and mobility—and add our magic sauce—then,
poof, it’s a DLA: value-added, revenue-generating, cost sav­ings, prod­ucts and ser­vices for our clients and their customers.”

How long before other online social net­works 1) go mobile and 2)  incor­po­rate Dodge­ball– or Sensor-like prox­im­ity features?

Nokia Sensor’s devel­op­ers briefly men­tioned in a lec­ture the syn­er­gies between cen­tral net­works (such as LinkedIn or online dat­ing sites) and prox­im­ity net­works. Like­wise, it seems to me Plea­sure­cards is an ideal com­ple­ment to mobile social com­put­ing (I’m not a mem­ber / would like to be invited).

On another note, this year we’ve already seen a num­ber of acqui­si­tions, with IAC/InterActiveCorp –> AskJeeves –> Blog­lines, Yahoo! –> Flickr, Google –> Dodge­ball and Sabre –> LastMinute.com (for 577M pounds) … As Marc Can­ter says, who’s next?

Tech­no­rati Tags: social­net­works, social­soft­ware, nokia, google, dodge­ball, asw