Exercising your fingers through Mobile Social Networking

Gone are the days, when a simple telephony system used to exist, and a single dial would take more than couple of minutes to connect to the other side of the world. I vividly remember getting my maiden mobile phone when I was in my super early 20's. Those were the days, I could afford the bills on my own. Today, technology has improved immensely, and times have changed rapidly. Today, even kids who haven't reached a double digit age mark, have handsets in their pocket. In the 90's, some of these handsets used to be very costly, and only a privileged section (err shall I say - high income?) of the society, made utmost use of its existence. Today, there is a mobile phone for every 1.5 person, and moreover this figure is to further reduce every quarter, as mobile companies fight for a share in the market to improve their ARPU (Average Revenue Per User). While the developed nations have reached the mobile saturation, developing countries are yet to improve upon their customer base, while the least developed nations are yet to explore a lot of uncharted opportunities within their region. I had been travelling around for a while, and as I travel, I keep updating my social networking status to let my close friends know about my whereabouts, and lucky me that the friends I have, I do get calls and I end up meeting them in their town. As people and business move, people are looking for smarter ways of accessing the internet and staying in touch with their clients and dear ones. Today, data services have become the new source of income. There is a huge potential, especially amongst the young segment, which have different ways of communicating and keeping in touch. Today, mobile social networking (SN) is on a rise, given the increase in the number of hits to networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, Xing, LinkedIn etc. This new channel of communication in the internet has a huge penetration in young adult segments. More than 68% of young adults in U.S between the age of 18 and 21 reach out to a well known SN site, while a little more than 42% of the adults above 21 in U.S reach out to SN websites. The trend is surely changing. As I was grazing through the websites and reading newspapers, I could see the number of people tweeting, or updating statuses all over the SN websites. What more, just see the uproar that our minister had caused a month ago, because of a tweet. Many studies and papers about communication channels suggest that there is a need and a want for these demographic users to stay connected, have 24 * 7 access to the internet-email-chat-social networking websites. Several handset providers are trying to bring in data services as quickly as possible, with Blackberry and iTouch leading the pack. These handsets still need to further develop the technology in order to meet the customer expectations and deliver the desirable user experience. Both the operators and the handset providers see a great opportunity as well as increased interest amongst the young professionals and teenagers. As technology moves forward, several devices are now internet enabled - the better the quality of the product and superior the functionality of the devices, the expensive these get. Clearly there is a need to have all applications such as Facebook, Yahoo, GChat, E-Mail, YouTube, Google Maps, News Channels, Photo Sharing, Social Networking etc. to promote the usage of the devices on a large scale to the young segment at-least. This will make the customers to up their data traffic usage and hold up an excellent customer experience. The market opportunity is definitely clear, however operators and hand set providers need to be innovative both with their product and marketing techniques for a successful launch. I wish I could have typed this with a Blackberry or a smartphone, that would have been a perfect end to this narration. Well I am yet to experience mobile social networking. Its just that my old cell phone is still loyal and doesn't seem to die of its own...