Synthesis Studios

We’ve been tinkering with a couple of different projects in the social media space; our most ambitious, 1Hop, has been attracting some attention recently. 1Hop is a cell phone application that grabs data from your online social networks and tries to rectify that against the phones (and therefore the people) you meet on the street. While 1Hop comes from the pedigree of Nokia Sensor, Imity, and some research work of Nathan Eagle while at the Media Lab, what I find the most compelling and different is that 1Hop is not creating a social network and taking it mobile, but instead relies on networks that you’ve already created and you already tend to – 1Hop just gives you a different view into those networks, one that is seen from the physical world.

1Hop is not creating a social network and taking it mobile, but instead relies on networks that you’ve already created and you already tend to – 1Hop just gives you a different view into those networks, one that is seen from the physical world.

For anybody who spends time away from his or her computer, this view is important! For that, I mean, it’s trivial for you to “meet” people online, but sometimes it does just come down to face-to-face. What do you talk about? The weather? The other person’s shoes? How about talking about a mutual friend instead? What about seeing the photos the other has placed on Flickr? 1Hop constantly does Bluetooth searches looking for other phones around you, consults with the 1Hop engine, and then decides whether it should buzz its user. We really don’t want to interrupt the user that often (he or she may already be chatting with somebody!), so 1Hop takes careful care to manage its user’s attention – and when he or she does pull out the phone, 1Hop puts up “just enough” information for him or her so he or she can put that phone right back and bring the eyes and face up.

Jason Karas, the Orange’s Director of Commercial Development, put together a great panel at Mobile Monday Boston a few weeks ago. It was a packed audience at Orange’s gorgeous Cambridge offices, and we were all speaking regarding “mobile social networking” (MSNing). Here’s a summary of what I said:

• I really don’t think it helps to equate “mobile social networking” with “using mobile devices to put content online for others to see” – then, what’s the difference between MSNing and blogging? Be specific when you’re speaking, and be weary of what other people say.
• The two ton elephant in the room is Facebook – awesome platform, but also, have you seen their iPhone interface?
• I really do want to say that anytime access is not that important for MSNs, but I would be deluding myself.
• I’ve yet to see a viable business model in this space as everybody is beholden to the carriers for their data and transmission costs. It costs the MSN cold hard cash to send out messages to its users (assuming it is using SMS), and it costs the user a non-trivial amount of their own cold, hard, cash to receive their data (monthly data rates from the carriers are absurd, and they keep raising their SMS rates to get ever increasing profit margins off it). I can’t imagine anything besides advertising from working, but you’re running the risk of annoying the user; dating sites (arguably 1Hop) could potentially charge yenta-fees (entrance and inter-user messaging) as they are acting as the intermediary.
• I strongly believe social networks are not born out of thin air – they are born out of address books, contact lists, and physical interactions. Online social networks additionally allow for the boredom/anonymity/consumerism of the user in that they browse through catalogues of people and add them to social networks willy-nilly. The latter will and does apply to MSNs. 1Hop adds an additional social force to that equation as most people, in a face to face interaction, won’t deal with these accrued personalities polluting their space and attention.

Tags: mobile, mobile monday, onehop, social network

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Synthesis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.