The Future of Social Networking is in Your Pocket
By Andrew Stollman, President, Q121.com

Most social networking sites springing into existence on the Web today suffer from virulent cases of “mySpace envy,” rushing to add me-too features and functionality that mimics, but in no way advances or improves the user experience. It’s hard to blame them in light of the juggernaut that mySpace has become -- the second most-trafficked site in the U.S., behind only Yahoo!, with more than 80 million members and a quarter million more joining every day.

But very few of those sites (and, by extension, their advertisers) have stopped to consider the fact that mySpace’s young, tech-savvy members spend less time with their laptops than with their mobile phones. As much as they value their computers, they think of their phones as extensions of their wardrobe, or as expressive of their personality as their car. And unlike any other media platform, they’re not just an infotainment device, but also their primary means of communicating with the world. For those reasons, mobile phone owners in that demographic are willing to spend just as much money on content for their phones as their browser-bound peers are paying to the iTunes Music Store -- the Yankee Media Group predicts that the 2006 worldwide mobile infotainment market will top $35 billion, led by ringtones, gaming, graphics, video and audio/music.

The convergence of these trends has created a marketing opportunity that’s only begun to be exploited by sites like Buzznet, Juicecaster, and our own offering, the just-launched Q121.com. Think of these sites as “mySpace-to-go,” in which social networking principles and content sharing are extend to mobile phones, allowing members to create affinity groups, send text messages, and share or purchase self-created or premium content seamlessly between their computers and phones.

This has all been enabled by the mobile carriers’ decision to open their “decks” and allow third party content aggregators to distribute directly to the mobile carriers’ customer.  As a result, direct-to-consumer portals like us have emerged to market content and services to consumers while relying on the carrier’s infrastructure for delivery, support and billing (in exchange for a healthy cut, of course). 

But all three of the sites mentioned above have offered their tools to consumers for free in hopes of spurring members to create and share their own content via their phones, thus driving growth virally and providing marketers with a platform to reach potentially millions of customers. (In contrast to the mobile content market, mobile ad spending is still in its infancy -- only $45 million last year. That figured is expected to swell to $1.3 billion by 2009, according to the tech consultancy Ovum.)

For example, Q121.com will launch this month with 50,000 registered users, after only a few months of beta-testing, and it is already adding several thousand new members each day.  Just under half of all members have already downloaded content to their phone, and of those, the average user is downloading 6.2 pieces of content each month. Our early demographic data implies that the average Q121.com member is between the ages of 16 and 28 years old (older than mySpace and similar sites) and is comprised of 61 percent women.

There is no doubt that in the long run, the mobile phone-as-platform will have greater reach and almost as much versatility as PCs today thanks to the combination of Moore’s Law and a young generation that has made mobile phones ubiquitous. But what they really want is something to do with their phones; the first generation of mobile social networking sites offer one solution.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />