Quite a few start ups seem to think so if a recent article in the New York Times is anything to go by.
If you think about it, the mobile device is the perfect medium for social networking for a number of reasons:
From the end user's perspective, the mobile phone is always with you. Why wait until you get to a PC to learn that "Matt is contemplating lunch"? I myself am guilty of updating my status to "Michael is using Facebook on his mobile!". It also means that cameraphone shots can be uploaded immediately and from a business perspective, a client's personal life can be investigated just before you walk into a meeting.
From the startup's perspective, it is about the potential advertising revenues. Mobile phones are highly personal compared with a PC which may be used by multiple people in the same family. Combine this with the demographic and preference information you provide when signing up to a social network site means a perfect channel for targetted advertising.
A recent study by Nielsen Mobile shows just how prevalent mobile advertising has now become with 23% of US mobile subscribers having seen an ad on their screens in the previous month and almost half of those claiming to have responded to at least one mobile ad. While these numbers sound impressive, they are based on a survey of 22,000 "active mobile data users who used at least one non-voice mobile service in the fourth quarter" so perhaps it is not really a statistically representative sample?
Now don't get me wrong, I am not skeptical about mobile advertising and its ability to drive investment in compelling applications, services and content. What I am highlighting is the missing piece in this puzzle - accurate numbers.
Mobile social networking sites will not be able to properly monetise their subscriber base without accurately communicating subscriber activity to advertisers. Everyone can talk about 'registered users', but this will overstate the potential audience if the number of social network sites that I have signed up to (but never visit) is anything to go by.
What advertisers need are measures such as page impressions, average session time and unique visitors, and most importantly, these need to be accurate!
Since many mobile devices will not support cookies, unique visitors and sessions times can be problematic. Tracking pixels also tend to under count due to image caching by both the handset and the WAP gateway - we typically see errors of around 30% - 35% when comparing our wireline capture technique with page tagging of this type...
So where does this leave mobile social networking? Their biggest competitive threat is not from each other but from the established web players - Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. They all now have mobile versions of their sites, they have existing advertiser relationships and they have enormous and active subscriber bases.
