BarCampBlock: Mobile Social Software

It seems like whenever you have a talk about mobile software, it devolves into converstation about everything that is wrong with the space (constrictive nature of the carriers, all phones have different properties, hard to develop for, hard to get users to adopt things, etc.). But, I thought that we got to some interesting points in this conversation, about mobile applications that can work today. You have to think simpler, and base things on SMS and WAP. Everybody wants to do cool things with location-based services and whatnot, but the technology just isn't there yet.

My notes follow.

led by: jordy, social games at digital chocolate, bebo.com

skyhook - company in boston, makes a firefox extension (loki) - senses nearby wifi networks, tries to triangulate your location based upon SSIDs that it can see (they built a DB that maps SSID to location)

standards in mobile

• WAP is pretty much a standard
  
• SMS is finally a standard (as of like 2 years ago)
  

if you get embedded on the phone - you're golden. People don't download java apps to phone (too hard, poor experience, etc)

barriers to entry

• downloadable apps - have to do engineering per phone
  
• barriers on cost side - costs money sms (e-mail to sms gateway works for hackers)
  
• distribution - have to find ways to get people to find your app
  
• usability - if it isn't sms or wap, people probably won't figure it out and use it
  

admob - mobile ads, works in wap browser; can target ads per country, operator, handset, etc.

• any hacker dude can add admob to their mobile site
  
• also, can buy ads, to help distribution
  

wurfl - open source mobile device db

Papers and other sources:

• social network graph - brad fitzpatrick - apparently, Brad gave a talk on this on the first day of BarCampBlock, that everybody was talking about.
  
• social network aggregator - bunch of startups in this area, can find via mashable.com

twitter is another great example of what can work in mobile - so stupid simple, which is key to their success

mobilemonday.net - tracks mobile industry news, has pointers to lots of other good stuff