Comments on: Mobile Operators & Social Networking

By: Robert Syputa

Robert Syputa — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:59:09 +0000

Social networking has seen accelerated adoption over a relatively short period of time. But there has been very little to hold users to a single service and few ways have yet evolved to develop significant revenues except for the professional social networks such a LinkedIn and Spoke.

I see difficulties for operators that stem from resistance for ads by social network users and inability to lock customers to an operator sponsored/white label service.

The path to success may be providing greater integration between phone book, EMS, unified messaging through a mobile web portal.

By: Allan Rasmussen

Allan Rasmussen — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:33:48 +0000

I see no reason why they should partner with facebook etc. since their users already drives revenue from usage on those communities (GPRS/EDGE/3G) but they could partner up with a developer team and get a branded community of their own.

They might have the means to do it themselves but one thing is coding it another thing is to maintain it.
One thing we have learned is that some of the operators doesn’t want a branded version because it will look like it is a service only for the customers of that particular operator – thereby missing access to other networks customers.

The biggest issue we have seen when dealing with operators and developing communities for them is that many are still seeing SMS premium as the only mean of income = they want users to pay for signing up or getting access. Example 24 hours access send a SMs to number XXX with the text XXXX. Instead they should focus on getting revenue from GPRS/EDGE/3G usage and forget everything about SMS premium.

By: admin

admin — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:01:01 +0000

Reach of 66% means that 66% of the internet users worldwide use social networking. This data is from comscore

By: vijay

vijay — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:39:58 +0000

There is simply no way a telecom operator is going to have the skill set to operate a large social network. The skills necessary to run large hadoop/hive/haystack/mapreduce/bigtable style infrastructure is simply not in the Telecom DNA. They can barely run their own networks as evidenced by the outsourcing of builds to their vendors. There is simply no way this will work.

/vijay

By: Ram

Ram — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:14:24 +0000

Good article. Thanks!

An Indian example seems to be the Aircel-Facebook partnership. Will be interesting to track the benefits of that deal.

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