Two parallel industries have seen significant growth in the past few years. The first is the mobile phone industry with particular growth in the area of mobile broadband. The second is the online world of blogging and social networking. Since both of these industries rely on the Internet, it’s of little surprise that a niche has cropped up for people interested in combining these two areas of their lives. As a result, we’re seeing a growing population interested in the ability to engage in blogging and online networking from their mobile phones.
Mobile Blogging: What it is and why we do it
Mobile blogging is the simple act of taking your blogging off of your PC and moving it over to your mobile phone. It refers to any act in which you use your mobile phone to post or edit your Internet blog. Most commonly, mobile blogging is done in addition to general blogging in order to supplement a website. For example, you might have a blog about wireless technology. You go to attend a wireless expo where you take pictures from your cameraphone that you upload directly from the phone to your blog so that your readers can see what you’re up to while you’re away from your computer.
Mobile blogging is a convenient method of being able to remain active on your blog without being tied down to your computer. For high-profile blogs that rely on scooping stories ahead of their competition, this can be crucial to boosting the traffic, ad revenue and profits of the site. For the personal blog, it’s simply a matter of simplifying your life. (For example, you may think of a great blog post while standing in line somewhere and draft it on your phone to work on later.)
Mobile Social Networking: What it is and why we do it
Mobile social networking, like mobile blogging, takes the increasingly popular world of social networking on sites like Facebook and MySpace and moves it to the mobile platform. Again, it’s particularly useful for people who want to take pictures with their camera phones and immediately upload them to their social networking profiles. It can also be a terrific way to stay in touch with others since you can always access your social network when you’re on the go. Many people don’t have time to keep up with all of their professional and personal networking messages while they’re at work but can stay on top of things by organizing their social networking site from their mobile phones during commutes and other downtime.
Mobile Web 2.0: The new face of things
As mobile blogging and mobile social networking have become increasingly popular, services have popped up that specifically combine the two with the goal of making the mobile web the primary platform. In other words, it has traditionally been that your blog or your Facebook profile was your primary platform which you occasionally accessed from your cell phone. Now we are seeing more and more services that make the cell phone platform itself the primary platform despite the fact that you can also access your site from a PC. This speaks to the fact that an increasing number of people are using their cell phones as a main method of access the Internet. This is only likely to grow in the years to come; mobile web browsing is expected to see over a 900% increase in the next four years.
Popular Mobile Web 2.0 Sites
There are a plethora of start-ups entering the area of mobile phone blogging, mobile phone social networking and the merging of these two industries. However, there are a few names that have gained some serious attention in the modern world of mobile Web 2.0. Here’s a closer look at which services they are and what they can provide for you if you’re interested in joining this latest cell phone Internet craze:
• Twitter. Twitter has been the most successful service in terms of combining blogging and social networking with a focus on the mobile platform. It functions in the same method as a typical social networking site in the sense that you can create a group of friends and follow their activities through their Twitter profiles. However, it is specifically focused on activity posted from your mobile phone. It’s advertised as a way to always stay in touch with what your social network is up to. For example; let’s say that you’re still at that wireless convention and you’re wondering if any of your professional networking buddies are there as well. Check their Twitter updates and see if anyone has posted a microblog from their phone. (Microblogging is the name for the short-form blog posts that are popular amongst people posting from their mobile phones.) You can also check if there are any messages (called Tweets on this site) from your friends to your own account.
• Textamerica. This is one of the most popular mobile blogging sites on the Internet for those people who are interested in posting photos to a blog from their camera phones on a regular basis. You can upload both photos and videos from your phone to your mobile blogging account using basic SMS and MMS phone functions. Like with many social networking sites, you create a profile and can set up a community of people that you want to share your mobile blog with. This is popular among people who are traveling because it lets them keep their loved ones posted on all that they’re seeing on the road. However, it can be used for any type of personal or professional blog that you might want to frequently post pictures to. In comparison with many other mobile blogs, it’s a picture-heavy site.
• Mocospace. For people who are more interested in the social networking aspect of these services than blogging per se, a popular site is Mocospace. It’s based heavily on the MySpace social networking site but is specifically designed for the mobile phone platform.
Mobile blogging and networking: What to expect
The popular sites that are available today for mobile blogging and mobile social networking are likely to set the stage for what’s to come. Several of these sites have been around for a few years and have worked out some of the kinks of moving a site to the mobile platform. As mobile broadband becomes increasingly available and affordable for the average user, there is likely to be a boom in the popularity of these types of websites. Because video is one of the hottest things happening on the web, it’s likely that there will be an increased use of mobile web video on both vlogging and social networking sites.
Thanks for reading our post! If you like it, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. This blog posts regular mobile phone news, reviews and pictures. Go ahead, subscribe to our feed!
Loading ...
One Comment
Kathryn, good post, thanks.
Yes, I think mobile SN and blogging will have a role. But will they dominate the space? Probably not. For one thing, much of SN is about directing people to content, most of which is blogs. But it’s hard to write a thoughtful blog post (or comment!) on mobile devices. Perhaps when voice to print technology matures, people will be more inclined to develop content on mobile. But that’s a while off.
For the moment, mobile will be, as you say, a niche industry in SN and blogging. An increasingly important one, and one to watch, but not dominant–for now.
I’m on Twitter. Follow me @Jungleman