Wikipedia defines mobile social networking as a form of social networking where one or more individuals or commonalities converse and connect with one another using the mobile phone. Social networking is gaining attention within the Mobile industry. The increasing popularity of iPhone devices among savvy mobile users and early adopters is only fueling the growth of mobile Internet usage. Gone are the days when people used the mobile medium primarily for checking email, news and weather information. We are seeing a growing demand for an enhanced mobile experience such as ability to share/send information to others, blogging, bookmarking, photo sharing, twittering, location based search, and the list goes on.

Mobile devices offer capabilities that PCs cannot. For instance you can get an up-to-date map of your friend’s location using the GPS functionality (from your 3G iPhone). You can instantly tweet your updates on Twitter.com from your phone when you are walking down the street. Even carriers are taking notice. Nokia has announced that its future multimedia phones will come integrated with Flickr application. Facebook began allowing major carriers such as Sprint, Cingular and Verizon to receive friend requests on phones and reply using SMS.

At Crisp, we understand the market demands and embrace the social networking concepts when we develop our iPhone sites. If you look at two of our most recent iPhone site launches (see screen shots); Washington Post and Newsweek ; you will find the Send/Share functionality on every article page. We believe this is a value added feature for mobile users. This allows users to share content instantly with others via popular social networking sites such as Facebook, friendfeed, MySpace or post on social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or Digg.

So visit these sites on your iPhone and start sharing away!

Xavier Facon | RSS 2.0 | Comment it , or trackback this post.