That’s why I find it interesting that Silicon Valley’s most influential tech blogs are today speculating on Facebook doing just that. See TechCrunch’s Facebook is secretly building a mobile phone, GigaOm’s Facebook should absolutely build a mobile phone and Business Insider’s Here’s Why Facebook Is Secretly Building A Phone: It Needs To Be A Platform, Not Just A Service. [Updated 21-9-2010] And now Read Write Web’s The Facebook Phone: Five Theories About What It Could Mean, Wired’s Is Facebook Planning a Phone? Who Knows? Should It? No and Inside Facebook’s A Facebook-Branded Phone, or Something Similar, Appears More Likely.
It’s now almost a year on since I wrote my post analyzing the cost benefits and ROI potential of the mega social networks (e.g. Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn) launching their own mobile phone. (See Facefone, myPhone and LinkedTel). In that post I explained how Australia’s Mobile phone operators were making more money out of providing Facebook as a service in the mobile phone contracts than Facebook was making out of its advertising strategy. I followed it up with Who profits from the 6 degrees of separation? and Why the iClone Wars will be the next mobile blockbuster to explained how the Mobile Handset was now the sweet spot in the mobile convergence market and how it provided the best opportunity for DIY media and traditional media companies to solve their ongoing Analog Dollars equal Digital Pennies problem.
How Analogue Dollars equals Digital Pennies
Today the Facebook economy is a mirror of the Mobile Phone Bling economy we examined months ago in More Eyeballs and More Revenues but is it the future of the mass media? – See 7 4 U 3 4 Me
However if Facebook chooses to pursue the mobile phone strategy it faces the same challenges of converting online traffic into real world customers that Google has encountered with the launch of the Nexus One. (See The Great Google Gamble: Does traffic equal customers? & What Lady Gaga can teach Google about the Mobile Phone Business). Clearly Facebook will need to model its mobile business on Apple rather than Google if it is to be successful in establishing a global presence in this space. (See What Apple can teach Google about market disruption)
This takes us back to Apple’s FaceTime and the idea that FaceTime or at least the social apps that will be developed to take advantage of this technology represent the future of social networking and social media.
The idea of the personal video phone is not new. It was first trialled in Japan nearly 20 years ago. I can remember reading the market research from that original study that clearly demonstrated the Japanese consumer wasn’t ready for a Face to Face device that was about to invade their privacy – after all who wants to invite strangers into their house?
Twenty years on and how times have changed. Today we have a whole new generation of emerging consumers who are not only happy to embrace “FaceTime” they invite the world to witness their most private and intimate moments.
The advent of MMS brought us the Sexting craze. Needless to say FaceTime will probably result in a similar craze.
What we are seeing today is a quantum shift in the way young people consume media. (See Is Social Media going to be a media tsunami?) After all, who needs to watch “Days of Our Lives” or even “Desperate Housewives” when you can witness the disintegration and/or celebration of million of lives on Facebook every day? That’s why, although the accuracy of some of the stats can be disputed (See Ad Age), Tod Sacerdoti’s Zynga And Facebook Are Killing Soap Operas has pretty much summed up the problem TV soap faces today. This trend will only be compounded as FaceTime and the other mobile video technologies evolve into social media broadcast platforms. (See Lisa Gansky talking about the Mesh and the coming web of Social Sharing of Video as part of Demo Fall 2010)
This (r)evolution in interactive media will become even more stimulating and invasive when we no longer have to point, click and discover who our next friend will be and we simply have to scan the crowd with our phone to discover who the “high value” (Think: Entertainment) social connections are in the room (See It’s not what you know, It’s not even who you know, It’s how you choose to connect. and GigaOm’s Apple May Go Where Google Won’t: Facial Recognition)
In a mobile world it is the mobile phone that is the social media platform of choice. That’s why it is inevitable that the Mobile OS will become the social media software services platform of the future. Put another way Apple doesn’t have to build a social network. It already exists. All Apple needs to do is to seamlessly connect all those iPhone, iPad, iTouch, iMac and iPod customers together. Hence the launch of Ping as an incremental step towards this goal. (See the social web is not a media platform it’s a communications platform)
Here then is the strategic challenge ahead for Facebook. Can it survive as a freemium software services platform that is layered across a wide array of mobile gadgets – and if so what is the revenue stream? or, does it profit from brokering strategic partnerships with those key industry players currently in search of an iPhone Killer (Think: Nokia)?, or, does it evolve into a mobile OS? or, does it go it alone by creating a stand alone mobile platform? In 7 years time will it still be the dominant social platform or will it be remembered as a passing fad; outplayed by the other platform owners higher up in the Mobile Convergence food chain? A struggling desktop dinosaur in an increasingly mobile world…
Posted on September 21, 2010
0