What is Social Omnipresence?

Social Omnipresence is term coined for a platform or service neutral roaming network in Social networking world.

Just imagine you take your [tag]social network[/tag] anywhere you go, beyond the boundaries of your PC, Laptop, Mobile and even your network host. So now, you are at the center of your network, that comprises of friends in Orkut or Facebook, Professional connections in Linked In, your Twitter followers and your blog readers etc.. You choose the platform that you want to use according to your convinience and your network make the decisions based on their preferences. Irrespective of platform that you choose to host your identity on, your network follows you…

Are we Ready Yet?

The building blocks are all there already. You have social networking sites. You have [tag]Mobile Social networks[/tag] that are catching up in a big way. You have emerging standards like [tag]Open Social[/tag] and [tag]Google Friend Connect[/tag] that will glue your identity together. Social Network Portability takes care of making your profile information available on all affiliated sites. OAuth and OpenID become your Social Security Identification (like SSN in real world). Just imagine, this opens a whole new business model for [tag]network aggregators[/tag]. We will see equivalents of [tag]Technorati[/tag] and [tag]Digg[/tag] to swarm the world of social networking. A recent report from Computer world confirms that the social networking community will hit 975 million mark by 2012. This opens up a huge market for “Social Networker” centric busines models.

It’s Feasibility

How feasible is this concept in today’s scenario? Especially with the recent stand off between Google and [tag]Facebook[/tag]. I dont this as a great threat. Infact, any new promising technology or concept always has multiple fathers claiming its origin. Many standards mushroom around it and its finally the user community and market forces, which decide the winner. Even if there are multiple standards that emerge around this concept, It would be rather easy to integrate using 3-4 parallel standards than 100s non standard compliant network. If you have worries about internet penetration, mobile usage and other demographics, be rest assured all trends are on their way up.

Conclusion

As I write this post, there are so many permutations and combinations that I can think of. Blog best practices that I made for my blog restrict me to make it any longer. I will leave that for later day and will leave you with this thought. And if you still think this concept is far away. Look at this post from [tag]Mashable[/tag].

Social networking is not new. It has been there for quite sometime now. It’s the cybercrowd that drives such applications. Isn’t it? And the statistics on Orkut, Facebook, mySpace and other famous platforms provide enough evidence that it is limited to young Tech Savvy generation. Mobile will drive the Next-Gen Social networking, Social network 3.0 as they say it. Last September Google bought Zingku, to extend it famous Social network to mobile phones. I was just analysing the trends and using my common man sense (as a mobile user myself) to see what factors would really break the “barriers to entry” for mobile social networking concept and make such apps better accepted by mobile audience. Here are my thoughts…

1. Usability of such apps will be the key- Though mobiles are becoming increasingly popular, they are still used by masses for just making calls. Though the mobiles are becoming intelligent, with new features and processing power, still the user interface remains limited. How many people actually use BlackBerry like PDAs with QWERTY keyboard. The screensize have increased but still it is small enough for users to match the visual experience of laptop or a PC. The mobile social networking platforms have to make the User Interface easy. That is the key. It is a great challenge for all your usability designers and graphics visualizers to make it as simple as possible. Remember, most of the mobile users still sont have a QWERTY keyboard.
2. Disconnected network- After voice, SMS/text is still the single largest way people communicate. The costs are high depending on you mobile plan and country. Especially, when you ask user to text to an international number. GPRS and 3G would be the alternatives, but have lower penetration in parts of the world. The idea here is to allow a disconnected way to connect with your social network. Users should be able to post there messages and store it locally. Once they are near a bluetooth zone, WIFI zone or in a sync mode with your PC, these get syncronised.
3. Low cost Phones - Low cost phones are a real bottleneck. New Gen phones are priced higher. The idea here is to introduce innovative ways to facilitate low cost handset users to network. Once the masses are hooked on to it, this could be a very good incentive for masses to move to more featured phones.

The discussions and ideas could be endless and I encourag that. The key point that I am trying to make is the mobile platform is a different world. The problems are different. Only those applications that bring good things in a simple and easier way to mobile users will see the boom….