Trendcatching

Faceparty to relaunch to take on myspace

New Media Age is reporting that the UK social networking/ dating/ chat site Faceparty is spending £2m on a relaunch of the site including:

• a digital music download service aimed at attracting record labels and clubs
• myspace-style profile sections for media companies and brands providing an "Official Group" section on the site with its own forum and networking tools for reaching users
• £1m investment in a new server archicture and a revamp of the backend code base

Apparently Faceparty have already signed up MTV, Vice Magazine, and Capcom to the "Official Groups" service which is pretty good going.  Faceparty has great traction in the UK but the next 6 months are crunch time as myspace ramps up its UK marketing efforts off the back of its new UK-focused front end.  There's definately market space for another major social networking site in the UK - lots of UK users dont feel that comfortable with the emo vibe of myspace, and as Facebook proves people are mostly interested in networking within their own niches. 

If Faceparty are smart they'll also invest in developing mobile extensions - this is the one area myspace will struggle to keep up as their mobile efforts are probably going to be retarded by their US-focus (most of the US carriers still have walled garden portals, which means online and media companies can't offer mobile services directly to users). So where's your mobile portal faceparty? 

The other thing Faceparty need to develop is an ecology of third party plug-ins around the site by allowing people more freedom to customise their profiles.  Myspace benefits from a range of add-ons and widgets like Slide and music video codes being available to paste into your site and from users being able to decide what their profile should look like. Myspace rival Friendster has now given users more freedom to customise and Faceparty needs to look at this too. 

Anyway that's enough free advice for now... let's see what happens

English language version of Cyworld due to launch April 2nd

An eagle-eyed person has pointed out that the about page of the US front-end of the Korean Cyworld service is indicating an April 2nd launch date.  The Korean Version has been a massive success in its home market and is now rolling out in Japan, China and the USA. 

The US front-end is already showing how the service has been localised and most of the core functionality already appears to have been built out.  You can already view the mini-home page user-interface, the list of items for decorating the room as well as the clubs or groups area.  Some of the copy-writing seems quite cutesy - "Thanks for the greatest gift of all - your Friendship" - not sure how well this would go down with the average myspace user.  I would think that greater localisation of the style and tone of the site is necessary for it to succeed in the US market.

Cyworld is owned by SK Telecom who added mobile access and other wireless features to the Korean version so it will be interesting to see if the US version can provide similar wireless functionality.  SK Telecom is a shareholder in the Helio MVNO so that is one possible way forward in terms of adding mobility functions in the US. 

Update to come once the service launches.

Mobile Music

Following the recent news that both Jamba and Monstermob are set to offer full track music downloads to subscribers it was interesting to see an alternative mobile music platform in operation just outside Old St tube station.

Elvin Zedo is a house music DJ that promotes himself through posters and a website which offer a free CD when you SMS a short-code (although you pay £1 on the text to cover the postage).

Given that mobile music services outside of operator portals are effectively still-born due to the lack of zero-rated data this method of delivering music via mobile makes a lot of sense. £1 for postage and packaging of a CD is a much cheaper form of delivery than mobile data which still costs up to £1 per MB on Orange in the UK - it would cost you £60 to download the same amount of music over the air!

Flagr launches - first of many?

 

Flagr, the US mobile location based tagging service has now gone live with a pretty slick beta.  Flagr uses SMS to allow people to create a "tag" on a google map to share the places they go and the things they are doing in the real world.  First impressions are pretty impressive - it's obviously early days but the integration with Google maps works really well and there's a lot of potential to build on the social networking and community aspects of the service.  Overall, this is miles ahead of the laughable early US efforts in the MoSoSo space, such as Dodgeball. 

No doubt this will be the first of a long wave of US mobile services as the country starts putting its immense engineering and financial power behind the mobile platform.  The window of opportunity for Europeans to establish a position in this space is beginning to close...

The World's Leading MoSoSo service?

Heres a Web 2.0 compliant, MoSoSo service with real traction that you won't see covered by Mobilecrunch or in fact anywhere at all but here...

Mywap is probably the world's leading mobile social software application with nearly 1.7m users, mainly in the UK, but also from other places around the world, particularly Eastern Europe where they seem to be skipping a generation of technology and moving straight to the mobile web. 

The service is run by 02, a UK mobile operator, based on a third party white label platform.  Mywap allows users to create their own mobile internet site or moblog including pictures, text, links to other sites and components such as guestbooks.  Vitally, the resulting site can be created and updated from a mobile so doesn't require access to a PC to use it, which goes someway to explaining the service's popularity.

People are using this functionality to create sites bigging up their favourite football teams, pop groups or tv shows as well as personal stories and pages.  It's fair to say that there's a fair bit of pirated content on mywap but this clearly doesn't account completely for the popularity of the service, given the range of different sites available.

As the big boys like myspace roll out mobile extensions to their services, they would do well to look at existing mobile social media sites like this to see what lessons can be learned.  The key learning coming out of mywap is that the ability to use mobile as the core access channel for the service, rather than just as a bolt-on is key. 

There's a whole load of other sites like this that simply aren't on the radar of most commentators so hold tight for more coverage here soonish ...