Untappd is basically Foursquare for beer lovers. Rather than checking in at a location per se, you check in with what type of brew you are enjoying. You can also attach the physical location of your hops-flavored concoction.
Untappd is a mobile web app. It works on iOS, Android, webOS and BlackBerry 6.0 and higher. What we really like about Untappd is that despite being a mobile web app, it could easily pass for a native app.
Graphics, animations, pop-up notifications and navigational structure are all akin to what you see in native apps like Foursquare or Gowalla. The app is also quite responsive and can use your location.
Untappd uses Foursquare’s mapping API for business names, which makes checking into specific locations a snap. You can also push your checkin back out to Foursquare. Like other location-based social sites, you can earn special badges based on when you check in, where you check in and what kind of brew you declare as part of your checkin.
What makes Untappd different from just a “Foursquare with beer badges” concept is that you can comment on what beers your friends are drinking. You can link your Facebook and Twitter accounts to find your Untappd friends, see what they are drinking and then comment or toast that drink. The app also shows you beer recommendations and shows a list of what beers are currently trending.
The website for Untappd lets you comment or toast others’ entries and view your checkins and badges. You can’t check in via the website; instead, Untappd wants you to use the mobile experience.
We really like how Untappd integrates with Foursquare for its checkin process, because it makes it easy for Foursquare fans to adopt. You can also choose to post your beer-flavored checkin to Facebook or Twitter.
We love the user interface. Seriously, this is one of the most well-done mobile web apps we’ve seen. We also appreciate how easy it is to check in, search for beers and even add beers to the database of drinks.
As niche social sites go, Untappd is very well executed and offers a good value-addition to an already popular social network.
There is some real potential for Untappd, especially if bars or breweries want to get involved in any sort of location-based deals promotion. How cool would it be to get a listing of happy hour specials or weekly promotions? We think any brand that paired Untappd with happy hours would have something really special.
McDonald’s Foursquare Day Campaign Brought in 33% More Foot Traffic With so many brands trying their hand at location-based marketing campaigns, one has to wonder: is Foursquare really effective as a platform for bringing in new business? McDonald’s seems to think so; the company’s head of social media Rick Wion recently spoke of the fast food giant’s big wins from a spring pilot program using Foursquare.
At the Mobile Social Communications conference yesterday, Wion shared that McDonald’s was able to increase foot traffic to stores by 33% in one day with a little Foursquare () ingenuity. McDonald’s total cost for the successful campaign was a measly $1,000.
Econsultanty reports that McDonald’s, with Wion driving campaign direction and strategy, opted to try and take advantage of Foursquare Day (4/16) to bring in more business. The company used 100 randomly awarded $5 and $10 giftcards as checkin bait to lure in potential diners. The bait also worked to attract the media’s attention and resulted in more than 50 articles covering McDonald’s Foursquare special.
The campaign worked in both digital and real world capacities. Patrons flocked to McDonald’s restaurants for the chance to win giftcards in exchange for checkins, and 600,000 online denizens opted to follow and fan the brand on social media sites.
“I was able to go to some of our marketing people — some of whom had never heard of Foursquare — and say, ‘Guess what. With this one little effort, we were able to get a 33% increase in foot traffic to the stores’,” Wion explained to conference attendees.
A company of McDonald’s size spends millions on advertising every year, and yet a simple $1,000 Foursquare campaign netted the company measurable success. Of course, the metric here was checkins (not sales), and there were likely several other factors contributing to the campaign’s success, but it’s still a story that many an agency should pay heed to.
McDonald’s is not alone in their Foursquare success. Earlier this year, Domino’s UK attributed social media, and its Foursquare pilot program in particular, as a primary factor in helping the company increase profits by 29%.
Looking at life through rose-colored glasses? How about walking through your town and seeing it as the Huffington Post or the Independent Film Channel sees it? IFC announced a new campaign this morning with leading location-based social network Foursquare that will allow you to do just that. The Huffington Post launched a Foursquare layer today as well.
IFC polled its member base for short descriptions of their favorite places in the towns they lived in or visited, then picked the place-descriptions that best suited the IFC's brand ("Always on, slightly off") to upload into a Foursquare database. Foursquare users can now opt-into getting those tips pushed to them whenever they check in near one of the annotated locations. It's a chance to effectively say, "I want to see this town as IFC fans see it." For marketers, this has got to be incredibly appealing, and for urban explorers it could be one of the best examples yet of effective Augmented Reality.
Location as Platform
In January, Canadian newspaper chain Metro did a deal with Foursquare that tied content like restaurant reviews to specific locations as "tips." When we saw that, we said that the era of location as platform had arrived. Then, in April the Wall St. Journal began experimenting with location-based news, adding interesting news tidbits to locations around New York City on Foursquare. That was getting interesting - not just lightweight content like restaurant reviews but things like a note that a terrorism suspect was once arrested in a particular location!
Please Push Me
Now the next logical step is to enable users to opt-in to having a publisher's content pushed to them. That's what IFC and on a smaller scale, the Huffington Post, have done today. Click to follow these publishers, check in near one of the locations they have annotated and your phone will get special tips pushed to it just like you get when near a place where one of your individual friends has left a tip.
A Psychedelic Journey
IFC's crowdsourcing its data set is very cool. It's not hard to imagine any number of organizations mobilizing their constituents to mark-up the physical world like this. Other organizations already have data geo-located. The Huffington Post Foursquare page is very sparse right now, but imagine if stories were parsed for geolocation (Superfeedr now does that automatically, for example) and populated locations by XML. You might check in downtown and get pushed a note from Huffington Post coverage of a protest or other news event a few blocks away. Not into HuffPo? How about a HotAir layer? Why silo yourself? Let's get a Memeorandum layer in Foursquare!
There may be some technical matters to work out before dynamic content can be fed into Foursquare, but I'm sure the company is working on those. (In response to this article Huffington Post Social Media Editor Rob Fishman tweets that many of the ideas discussed here "are already underway.")
I'm ready to follow the local historical society, an environmental justice organization or two, perhaps an art-graffiti-watchers association - the possibilities are nearly endless. Imagine allowing background location tracking and notification for some layers. "To see the world through the lenses of my favorite organizations" would be a nice addition to the reasons why people say they use check-in apps.
Can Facebook implement this kind of feature once location is rolled into its service? It's a little hard to imagine; this feels like a feature that would best come from a service with location at its core.
In a perfect world, these location-based social networks would act like browsers, able to see and post interoperable location-based data from and to any platform. Don't hold your breathe on that, though. The potential impact of marking-up the world is large enough that single vendors are most likely to try to dominate it all on their own first.
And to follow on from that, a great concept post from my favourite guys at PSFK:
Intelligent Cities: The Personal City
May 10, 2010
The development of systems that allow city wide exchange of data and the reaction to that data is important to study. The impact of what is sometimes called the sentient city is not just at a city level but it also impacts communities, neighborhoods and families.
Intelligent Cities can create personal, helpful, efficient and communal cities. In four articles on PSFK, I’m going to describe each of these four aspects and the manifestations occurring today that point to a better urban future.
We are broadcasting information about us more than ever before and we can interpret this data to help us understand our quantified selves.
Devices collecting personal data about our lives give individuals deep levels of insight on their habits and behaviors. These systems are often passive, gathering data in the background from day-to-day activities. Over time, this information gives people the tools and motivation for people to improve their lives.
Manifestations Of The Personal City
Check In & Share
The popular Foursquare service provides a simple example of how people appear to be more willing to provide their personal information. Foursquare is a combination city guide and social game that encourages people to explore their cities while broadcasting information about their location. Users are motivated to share this personal data as part of a competition with their social circle, receiving points each time they check in at locations such as restaurants and bars.
Passive mobile apps monitor sleep habits over time
Mobile applications like Owl and Sleep cycle track a user’s sleep habits passively during each night. By monitoring a user’s movements, snoring levels, and other ambient data from the environment, these services collect a comprehensive database of information that helps to better understand one’s behavior.
Shared Traffic Info
Waze is a free mobile application that enables drivers to build and use real-time road maps, alerts on traffic and accidents, and data. Drivers can actively report and update other users with what’s happening on the road including accident alerts, police traps, weather hazards, cheap gas offers and more.
Connected body scale wirelessly sends weight data to the web
The Withings Connected Body Scale measures a user’s weight, fat mass, and lean mass, and sends that data wirelessly to a personal profile online. The device syncs with Google Health to build a long-term picture of the user’s health information.
Future Developments
How could the Personal City enhance our lives? Here is some of the suggestions we received at a recent presentation with Asian/Pacific region bloggers:
1. A weight monitoring system tells you what to eat
2. In-depth data allows for better matchmaking service
3. Find likeminded people to sit together when you travel
4. Monitor energy consumption
5. Understand the relationship between food types and your weight gain
There are plenty of other ways the Personal City can evolve. Leave your suggestions in the comments box.
Next Steps
PSFK has prepared a unique presentation on Intelligent Cities. If you would like to invite our staff to present it to your team and discuss possible opportunities for your company to explore, contact PSFK’s Jeff Weiner – jeff.weiner@psfk.com
Seems like the logical next step i'd say... Thanks Ang via Mashable
Here’s an interesting idea. The recently launched service Gatsby aims to connect locals on Foursquare who share the same interests.
The setup is simple. Sign up for Gatsby with your Foursquare () account, which will add Gatsby as a friend, and tag yourself with your favorite interests — say, “Water Polo,” or “Cranberries.” (Or, as the site’s screenshots suggest, “Cats” and “Circus”.) Then, continue on your merry way.
As you check in at your usual haunts, Gatsby will automatically determine if there are other Foursquare/Gatsby users in your area who share your affinity for cranberries, and attempt to connect you. When a potential match occurs, Gatsby sends a text message to both parties with the first names of each user and a list of the shared interests. If both agree to connect, Gatsby can also set up a temporary SMS relay so that the users can text each other (and potentially meet in person) without revealing their mobile numbers.
The idea is intriguing, and could really take location-based services to a whole new level by bridging the gap between semi-anonymous lists of check-ins and real-time, in-person social networking. However, meeting strangers face-to-face based on scant social network details is sure to turn some more cautious users away.
What do you think? Could this be the ultimate location-based ice-breaking service, or a recipe for a big privacy nightmare? Let us know in the comments.
In 2019, when you look back at the social media landscape ten years earlier, you might laugh at how hard you had to work. You had to type things into forms (ha! remember those?), type URLs in the address bar (how archaic!), and put up with irritating communications about irrelevant products. Social media in the future will be effortless and everywhere. Here’s a look at some of the new technologies in store for us over the next 10 years that will make our social (media) lives easier.
1. The Arduino – One Tough Little Italian
Arduino is a small circuit board commonly used to prototype electronics. Its low cost and ease of implementation has meant that this little device is now leading a hobbyist revolution in connecting real life objects to social networks, like Twitter (). It has allowed one man to create a device attached to a chair that tweets at the presence of noxious natural gasses (ahem), another uses Arduino to monitor when his cats are inside the house or out, and a small bakery and cafe in East London is now able to tweet what’s fresh from their oven. This may all seem like pretty pointless stuff, but the pointlessness is the point.
The revolution of objects notifying human beings of their state (e.g., The Internet of Things) isn’t happening in the R&D labs of large multinational conglomerates, it’s happening in the spare rooms, garages and bedrooms of developers. The printing press, possibly one of the first inventions to aid information sharing, was invented by Johannes Gutenberg with investment intended for an altogether different enterprise: polished metal mirrors intended to capture holy light from religious relics, presumably to sell to hapless tourists. In other words, what might seem like silly tinkering today, might be a key contributor to our future world.
2. RFID Tags & Transponders
While Arduino will help household items become involved in our social media world, transponders such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are truly breathing life into our objects.
For a number of years RFID tags have been used in passports, ID cards, travel cards and credit cards as a means to identify us when scanned, and they are used commercially for inventory tracking. Brands including Abercrombie & Fitch, Levis and Kleenex have experimented with RFID tags to track their inventory at an item-level. Transponders can be made as small as a grain of sand and can be produced very cheaply. So it is widely thought that they may one day be installed in everything from a packet of biscuits to a pair of underpants.
But RFID tags have potentially valuable real-world applications. It may be possible, for example, to create a very cheap device which sits in your trash can or recycling box and monitors the contents by scanning RFID tags as stuff is thrown in. You might ask why anyone would want to do this with their garbage, but there is a lot of valuable data to be had in what is, in essence, scrobbling for your trash. Your trash is a goldmine of consumption data in the same way that your search data or browsing history is, and could be used to track brand loyalty and consumption habits.
And mobile phone manufacturers, particularly Nokia, are currently experimenting with consumer devices that act as readers and scanners, meaning that your mobile device might be able to do things like exchange information with other phones by bringing them near to one another, or gather information directly from products and find out instantly if anyone in your network has purchased the item in the past. Within the context of mobile phones, this technology is generally referred to as NFC (Near-Field Communication).
Of course, just because we could do this, doesn’t necessarily mean we would, or should. There are clear privacy implications involved that might make the idea of monitoring consumption via your trash or tracking your underpants dead on arrival. Privacy advocates such as CASPIAN are highly motivated to prevent this from happening — the notion that RFIDs could be on our person without us knowing is akin to web sites sharing knowledge about us without our consent. The anti-RFID site spychips.org has more information about the privacy concerns of the technology.
3. Geomagnetic Sensors in Mobile Devices
The compass is hardly new — it’s been around for thousands of years — but Yamaha has created a tiny 2mm x 2mm chip intended for use in mobile phones as a compass. When used in conjunction with GPS, AGPS or Wi-Fi triangulation and an accelerometer a compass heading could be extremely useful to give more granular positioning data to mobile applications.
Some older phones used to come equipped with these compasses, and though they have been phased out in recent years, they’re starting to make a comeback. Apple Insider suggests that the next generation of iPhone hardware will contain a “Magnetometer,” the feature already exists in the HTC Dream (the T-Mobile G1), though it is currently used for very little.
But the real world applications are many. For example, let’s say that you’ve just come out of a subway at a roundabout, and the first thing you do is take out your GPS-enabled phone’s mapping application to see where you need to walk to get to your friends waiting for you at a bar. In order to orientate yourself correctly, you’ll need to find street names. But if you happen to be in London, where I live, you know that street names are rarely in convenient places, they’re usually hidden behind trees and other signs (where’s the fun otherwise?). So a compass heading is a perfect way to let you know which direction you roughly need to walk in. Likewise, if you want to scan an area at a certain location for a great place to eat, your device is going to need a heading in order to overlay information over the top of your screen.
Imagine you’re on your way to a conference and you have a couple of hours to kill so you park yourself in the corner of a local bar to catch up on Mashable (). You’ve barely begun reading when an attractive girl or guy catches your eye. You’re transfixed, your heart starts to race — you’re in love. But being the shy type you can’t just go over and introduce yourself, so instead you do a quick scan of the room with your cell phone to pick up any latent metadata. Unfortunately, a social network profile pops up informing you that the object of your affection is in a relationship. Your initial excitement rapidly dissipates and you get on with your reading.
That scenario is pretty far-fetched, but it’s one potential promise of Biometric Face Recognition technology that is already used by police and security services to help identify known criminals. 3 years ago Google acquired Neven Vision, a company that provides such technology. Google reported that it is using this technology in its Picasa product to help keep your personal photos organized without you needing to do any of the actual organizing. I have literally thousands of pictures of my children and family on my computer at home. It would take me days to go through and tag each one so that I could search them more easily in the future. But at some point, Picasa might be able to tag everything for me automatically by recognizing faces and objects in my photos.
That’s still not quite to the level of our hypothetical, but Tochindot’s Sekai Camera and Wikitude are making in-roads into rich and immersive ambient metadata, too. Their current goals revolve around tagging inanimate objects, but someday biometric face recognition could be used to attach metadata to real people.
5. OpenID, OAuth, and the Identity Graph
Having to remember passwords for multiple accounts can be frustrating, and answering the same questions over and over on registration forms becomes tedious. Ten years from now, filling out our information once and then easily transferring it from place to place might be commonplace.
OpenID is an open authentication protocol that lets users use a single set of login credentials for every site they visit. It’s already in use at hundreds of smaller websites and large sites like Facebook () are starting to accept OpenID accounts. Once you’ve authenticated, a second open protocol called OAuth will help you share data about yourself with other sites you use. OAuth lets your grant authorization to sites to collect data from other places you participate online, which ultimately could eliminate the need to fill in redundant information about your profile and who your friends are at each new site you use. And companies like Cliqset and DandyID are creating platforms that will allow you to share your entire identity graph information from your profile to your contacts to your lifestream.
Together, these technologies could essentially eliminate the need to fill out forms and register for sites all together.
6. Mind Reading
My favorite scene from Back to The Future 2 is one in which Marty visits a 1980s-theme cafe where he sees some kids looking at his old favorite arcade game. Marty tells them he’s a “crack shot” but when he demonstrates the interface, the kids complain, “You have to use your hands!? That’s like a baby’s toy.” Classic.
But the idea of being able to control an interface without the use of your fine motor skills has massive implications for human computer interaction. Consider the ability to tweet what you’re thinking without having to pull your phone out of your pocket, type your message and hit send. Imagine being able to think ‘Facebook’ and your screen presents you with an overview of your friend’s activity stream. This method of interaction is at a very experimental stage but there areproofs-of-concept that exist. Most of this kind of innovation is currently intended to help people with limited motor skills, and not lazy social media addicts, however.
7. Natural Language Processing
Like Optical Pattern Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP) seeks to automatically categorize and understand that which humans understand with ease. By doing so, computers will be able to understand the requests and needs of their human users far better. Of course, talented programmers can already tell their computer to do things with ease, but the rest of us would benefit from applications that understand our curious ways of speaking.
Firefox’s Ubiquity is one project that’s attempting to change the way we interact with the web by allowing people to use natural language commands. Further, in the future, applications might exist that could analyze your tweets or comments with NLP, and suggest people or brands for you to follow.
The Future
Many of the technologies explored in this post are in their infancy, but they could have a profound effect on how we use the Internet and social media in the future. If you know of any other technologies that you feel might advance the future social media landscape please mention them in the comments.
Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH where he helps brands such as BlackBerry, Nestlé, Johnson & Johnson, and Hasbro get the most from digital media. You can follow Mike on Twitter.
Augmented Reality (AR) is when virtual graphics and/or data are overlaid onto real world objects. Many of you have seen this portrayed in movies such as Minority Report and The Matrix. It still seems a bit far fetched in 2009, yet there are apps that are beginning to make it a reality. One is Wikitude, an Android mobile app that mixes location imagery with information from Wikipedia. We first noticed it back in May 2008, when it was announced as one of the winners of the Android Developer Challenge.
Wikitude is described on its website as "a mobile travel guide for the Android platform based on location-based Wikipedia and Qype content." Essentially it allows users to overlay information from Wikipedia onto a photo of a certain location, via Mobile Google Maps. It currently supports 350,000 locations by GPS or by address. Wikitude was launched at the same time as the G1 phone in October 2008 and is currently available in the Android Market. Here's a video of how it works:
There are many potential scenarios for AR. A popular one is doing your grocery shopping and checking information on your mobile phone (or AR glasses!) about price, specials, reviews, comparisons with competing products, etc. With the rise of RFID chips and technology such as that being developed by Microsoft, this type of scenario isn't too far away.
Another interesting consideration is that social software will have a big role to play in future AR apps. For example when walking down the street, you could use your mobile phone to point to a restaurant, and overlaid on a photo of the restaurant would be customer reviews, recommendations, and other relevant user generated data. (inspiration from Rafael Torres)
Let us know other apps that are doing interesting things with AR technology mixed with the Internet. And of course we'd love to hear about your favorite future AR scenarios!
European researchers working on the MOBVIS project have developed a new system that will allow camera phone users to hyperlink the real world. After taking a picture of a streetscape in an urban area, the MOBVIS technology identifies objects like buildings, infrastructure, monuments, cars, and even logos and banners. It then renders relevant information on the screen using icons that deliver text-based details about the object when clicked.
This project goes beyond today's mapping applications like Google's Street View, for example, which first identifies your location either via GPS or triangulation and then shows you pictures of that area. Instead, MOBVIS actually lets you "see" the world through your mobile phone. This is computer vision, or rather, mobile vision.
Editor's note: During 2009 there have been some posts on ReadWriteWeb that didn't get the attention they perhaps deserved - because of timing, competing news stories, etc. So we're starting up our Redux series again, to re-publish some of those hidden gems. This is one of them, we hope you enjoy (re)reading it!
There are obviously numerous potential applications for such a technology. On the MOBVIS homepage, they offer up some scenarios for how their application could be used, including the following:
Tourism/Augmented City Maps: The MOBVIS technology could be used to inform visitors about the objects in an area be they buildings or landmarks. The images could also be annotated with additional information like history, event information, or information about nearby shops.
Visual Localization: For phones without GPS technology, triangulation could be combined with the computer vision technology to locate a user's position and orientation in a manner that would be comparable to GPS and just as accurate.
Motion Estimation: Also comparable to GPS, MOBVIS could enable continuous position updates to determine the location of objects in motion as well as their speed.
Incremental Map Updates: MOBVIS supports incremental updating of maps which would allow for the automated authoring of the urban infrastructure. No longer would Google need to send their vans around taking pictures of streets - the data could be uploaded from users' phones as they took their photos.
Picture-Driven Search Engine: Because the mobile phone could now "see" the surrounding landscape, the world - reality - becomes the backdrop for a sort of picture-driven search engine in which the objects in the world are all hyperlinked and annotated like a real-life semantic web.
How It Works
The MOBVIS system begins with a pre-populated database of geo-referenced panoramas (such as Google's Street View, perhaps). The objects in the images are then manually annotated with information. Once that's complete, the system is ready for search queries from mobile users. After a user takes a picture, MOBVIS compares the photo to the photos in its database and returns the relevant links.
The challenge here is getting a mobile phone picture to match up with the more pristine photos found in the database. The database photos would likely be clear, crisp, and detailed, but a user's photo could be grainy, taken on a dark and cloudy day, or taken from an odd angle.
The MOBVIS system's main strength comes from its feature-matching algorithm developed by the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, one of the partners of the project. This algorithm can very accurately detect minute differences between similar objects. In real-world tests, it's reported that this system was highly accurate, detecting the right building 80 percent of the time.
Aleš Leonardis, head of the Ljubljana team, believes that number can be improved. He also notes that that the system, though not always right, was never wrong. "It was remarkable that there were no false positives," he says. "Sometimes the system couldn't identify a building, but it never put the incorrect link on a building."
This Modern Age: The Youth Ball Welcomes Obama with a Sea of Digital Cameras [Gizmodo] - The image really speaks for itself here. Note that it is the Youth Ball. It paints a compelling picture for those companies and brands not sure whether or not to dip a foot in the mobile pool yet. If anything, they should be rushing to populate the space so that, by the time these young consumers reach full consumption potential, they are already used to interacting with those brands that capitalized early.
I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle [Wired] - Another location-based feature from Wired - this time it’s freelancer Matthew Honan’s discovery of just how transparent the world can be through location-based applications. True, some care and some don’t - it’s more of a case study on the potential level of interaction and the decrease in privacy for those who choose to play.
Sephora launches mobile service to assist shoppers in-store [Mobile Marketer] - Sephora recently rolled out a mobile service that allows in-store shoppers to check customer reviews re: products of interest on their mobile phones. It’s a perfect synthesis of relative and timely content and should ultimately serve Sephora by building customer loyalty.
Time sensitive mobile contents - Day to Evening deco mail [CScout Japan] - This mobile mall from Gigno System changes its theme depending on the time of day. It’s cute in the morning and afternoon, but at night, the lipstick and eyeliner come out. It’s perfect for those who unwind from the more formal light of day by breaking out the leather and hitting the neon.
The first live-tweeted surgery [Global Neighbourhoods] - The surgery wasn’t directed via Twitter (thank god, given its history of crashing unexpectedly), rather, the surgery updates were tweeted live to a conference of professionals interested in the procedure in question.
Arsenal fans could catch replays, live action on Sony’s PSP [Engadget] - Sony is working to develop software that would allow live replays and, perhaps, real-time interaction between fans on their PSPs during Arsenal home games. (British soccer, for those who don’t know) However, given the rowdy nature of soccer games, PSPs brought into the stadium may only provide a high-tech beatdown for those in the way of portable-wielding fans.
Inside the GPS Revolution: 10 Applications That Make the Most of Location [Wired] - Are you addicted to GPS? Does location-based content make you sweat? Do you spend your nights tossing and turning, wondering which celebrity has the largest chin? If you answered yes to the first two, Wired has got your hook-up for location-based goodness. For the insomniacs, see here.
Earlier today we covered a mobile social network called Buzzd, which will be featured at the music festival Bonnaroo. In this post we outline 10 mobile social networks to keep your eyes on. It's a developing field - and there are issues such as hardware compatibility to overcome - but we expect some of these services to make a big impact in the next year or two. Because, as Sarah Perez recently noted, with 975 million mobile web users expected by 2012, this is a potentially very lucrative market.
Editor's note: Looking back over 2008, there were some posts on ReadWriteWeb that did not get the attention we felt they deserved - whether because of timing, competing news stories, etc. So in this end-of-year series, called Redux, we're resurrecting some of those hidden gems. This is one of them, we hope you enjoy (re)reading it!
Of course our list is subjective, so please leave a comment if we missed one of your favorites. Also let us know your thoughts on social networks going mobile. We've written before that MySpace, Facebook, and MSN are the leading mobile services - and March stats indicated that MySpace is the leader. But surely there will be one or two unknowns who rise to capture this nascent market. So with that in mind, here we go...
Dada
Dada is a mobile SNS that enables users to update personal blogs with pictures and video, download mobile entertainment, connect with and meet other local singles in real time and stay in contact with all their friends. Dada can be used on both PC and mobile, and dada.net is its portal destination page. The 3 main products within the portal are Dada Dating, Dada Life (personal space and social networking), and Mobile Entertainment.
Recommendations company Strands started out as a music discovery mobile social networking service. Its mobile features include a mobile Web portal, a personalized radio station, and a personal version of partyStrands (its service for party organizers, bars, clubs and DJs). Strands' mobile social networking service basically enables its users to find music and network with their friends via their mobile phones.
The itsmy.com mobile community wants to be MySpace for your phone. By connecting people and content in both the U.S. and E.U., itsmy has already gathered up more than 1 million registered mobile users with 4 million mobile home and content pages and continues to grow. Recently, itsmy announced they've now launched 100,000 personal mobile TV channels - one for each of its top 10% of content-uploading customers.
In April mobile social networking company Frengo released a toolkit for development of Open Social and Facebook applications on mobile phones. The Open Social Mobile Toolkit supports MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, and Facebook and allows developers of applications on those networks to extend them to the mobile phone. In addition to extending support for the Open Social and Facebook platforms to the mobile phone, the Frengo toolkit allows developers to monetize applications via the company's social advertising platform or via premium SMS.
In July 2007 Nokia acquired the media sharing service Twango. Twango combines online storage with social networking, allowing users to organize and share photos, videos and other personal media. ReadWriteWeb wrote an in-depth profile of Twango in January '07, in a post entitled Twango Tackles Lucrative Media Sharing Market. Nokia planned to use Twango to enable users to share multimedia content through their desktop and mobile devices.
Shozu is not strictly speaking a social network, but it enables you to share your videos and photos via your mobile phone - e.g. from your Flickr account, YouTube, Facebook. RWW reader Honor said in a past post that "it allows me to send the pictures I take with my n80 to Facebook and share with my friends, or email people pictures while I am at an event, shopping for stuff for them etc..."
We recently profiled Brightkite as a winning mobile social network in the arena. Brightkite allows for your network of friends to keep track of where others may be at any moment. Since no GPS is required, users can send updates to the service via text messaging or email, to update their profile with location updates, pictures, and notes. With a host of privacy settings to prevent any form of stalking, Twitter users are increasingly using the network to update friends with status locations sent to their Twitter streams. Brightkite may be one of the best mobile networks to use, especially when going to a conference or big event in town.
Zyb
Taking a different approach from Brightkite, Zyb aims to be a mobile contact organizer for your social network. While we already have our address books for this, Zyb looks to provide a way for you to backup and synchronize your contacts online. You can store your phone numbers, calendar and texts, manage this information online, and transfer your information to a new phone if there ever comes a time. You can also use Zyb to find out who has you in their phones as a contact and even discover friends of friends. Think of Zyb as an expansion on your Facebook pictures and contacts, only more mobile.
Groovr
Groovr is your mobile network's night out on the town. Post a picture, message, or video to your Groovr profile and have it sent to all your friends too. Instant chat? Groovr's got you covered. However, some of these features are redundant. Can't we already send messages, pictures, and videos to our friends without a third party? The only feature we found remotely unique is a city's Explore page on Groovr. All of your posted items are sent to the corresponding cities Explore page. Here's a peek at San Francisco on Groovr:
Fon11
Developed by MoBlast Technologies, Fon11 could become the hottest mobile social network for the iPhone. With a nice UI (of course) and great features like the ability to see just how far away your contacts are from you, availability status messages, visibility settings and more, it seems Fon11 has a lot more to offer than the rest of the pack. Fon11 has already been ported to Android and Nokia Web Runtime with development plans in the works for J2ME and Windows Mobile platforms. While GPS remains an issue through no fault of Moblast, we've been assured that there are many strategies in development to find a resolution.
We hope you enjoyed this look at 10 interesting and exciting mobile social networks. The information in this post came from a variety of past ReadWriteWeb articles and we will continue to explore this promising market. In the meantime, please list your favorite mobile social networks in the comments below.
Thanks Gizmodo for this post on a really cool iphone app. This is pointy end of a fast approaching world 2.0 that i personally can't wait to see arrive.
Sekai Camera is the killer iPhone application I was looking for: just point your camera anywhere around you to have instant feedback about whatever is on your screen. Directions, reviews, messages, offers, and any tag you can imagine will appear floating in front of you, adding a graphic overlay to the world.
Tonchidot defines their amazing Sekai Camera--in Japanese, World Camera-- as a "social tagging device" for the iPhone. It combines most technologies in the iPhone 3G, from the camera and the GPS to the internet connectivity and its microphone. When you start it, the application first checks where you are using the built-in GPS in the iPhone 3G.
At that point you can do two things. One, you can see information about places and objects around you, overlaid on the real-time video. Two, you can add your own information, whether you are an individual, a business, or any other kind of organisation. You just point and add your tag, which can include text, images, and sound. [Tonchidot via Dvice]
RJDJ is an iPhone App that connects the outside world to your acoustic perception, and essentially changes the way you perceive reality.
RJDJ basically works like this: The phone can record sensory data around you (sound and movement), and associates it with a “scene” of your choice. These scenes, all created by different artists, are more like morphing soundscapes. They react to the incoming noises and movements and, depending on the scene you’ve selected, reacts differently–through both visuals and sounds. In a way, it’s a lot like a movie soundtrack scored in real-time.
Thanks yet again to NGT. I strongly recommend you check out this demo because its easier to appreciate when you see it in action.
Listen up P&O people... This is a cool site for Viking Cruises (a booze cruise party ship) where you send in a video of you dancing and are matched up with other people that share your dance style. You can then meet up with them on ship to share the disco fever... Very funny to watchhttp://www.dance-match.se/
Cheers Helen Cowley for sharing these posts on some great stuff that's happening in interactive display:
Live hologram of Telstra CEO hosts conference - Musion from the UK are behind Australia's first look at a real time, 3D holographic projection. Sort of fitting that Telstra yet again makes a splash by showcase something that isn't theirs :).
Some work from De-Construct in the UK: Interactive shop front
Task – Create an innovative launch idea for a new loyalty / credit card – Integrate with the above the line advertising, which used the Dean Martin song ‘That’s Amore’
Solution – Use a combination of interactive technology and an innovative audio application to turn the M&S flagship branch on Oxford Street into a live brand experience – Install a system triggered by passers-by that would serenade them down the street with the ‘Amore’ soundtrack – Enable the lyrics displayed across a series of plasma screens to change colour in response to people’s clothing colour
Results – Research on 2 store windows at M&S on Oxford Street showed that the interactive window increased the number of passersby who stopped and looked at the windows by 1500% – Acknowledged as a ground breaking use of interactive technology for retail window marketing
Smart shoe wall –Created bespoke retail installation using RFID technology –Customers can choose a shoe and place it on a reader to receive rich media content - 171 smart shoe walls are in use in adidas flagship stores in the US and are being rolled out to Europe
Looking at life through rose-colored glasses? How about walking through your town and seeing it as the Huffington Post or the Independent Film Channel sees it? IFC announced a new campaign this morning with leading location-based social network 
Now the next logical step is to enable users to opt-in to having a publisher's content pushed to them. That's what IFC and on a smaller scale, 
Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at 
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European researchers working on the 
Editor's note: During 2009 there have been some posts on ReadWriteWeb that didn't get the attention they perhaps deserved - because of timing, competing news stories, etc. So we're starting up our Redux series again, to re-publish some of those hidden gems. This is one of them, we hope you enjoy (re)reading it!
Earlier today we covered 
Recommendations company 
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In April mobile social networking company 
We recently profiled 
Taking a different approach from Brightkite, 
Developed by 
