Mobile messaging moves into social communities

When Nokia Corp. announced a takeover bid for OZ Communications late last month, it was a sign that the mobile Internet was becoming a larger part of the cell phone giant's growth strategy. But as OZ's president and CEO explains, Nokia also recognized the increasing importance of mobile messaging in the social community context to future growth.Just as messaging is an important aspect of popular social networking or community sites such as Facebook, Jim Knapik says the same will hold true for mobile users of these sites. "There are elements of social networking, which we call social messaging, that will help us evolve the things that we've been successful in offering for email and instant messaging, but making them more relevant with respect to the things the end user can do and the communities that they can get access to," he tells Report on Wireless.OZ is at the forefront of enabling traditional email and instant messaging on the mobile platform. Its technology is installed in handsets from leading manufacturers and is used by many operators in North America and Europe.As a general rule, mobile messaging - email, instant messaging and SMS - continues to grow at phenomenal rates. Today, Canadians send 54 million text messages per day, up significantly from the early days of SMS when there were 20 million messages sent in November 2002.In the social community environment, there are two ways users can send messages: the deferred delivery model similar to email and online chatting or direct messaging that is similar to instant messaging. Knapik says allowing "the user experience to take place from inside one of the new social communities" is a key driving factor for the future of mobile messaging."We have a firm belief that adding those types of messaging capabilities to the wireless experience is really the next focus for wireless messaging," he says.Numbers show trend is shaping upA recent report from ABI Research suggests that mobile social community messaging will be an integral strategy for all platform and device vendors in the future. While SMS will still generate the lion's share of mobile messaging revenue (US$177 billion) by 2013, regional differences will determine the success of messaging expansion into new areas such as mobile social networks.M:Metrics noted in a recent study that Americans are spending more than four and a half hours surfing the Internet on their smartphones, and Facebook was in the top five garnering the attention of smartphone surfers for one hour and 24 minutes per month on average. On days visiting the Facebook site, the user was there for 14 minutes.Given the mobile messaging trend that is shaping up, it's no wonder Nokia jumped at the chance to get its hands on Montreal-based OZ."Developing mobile messaging has been our key focus and with the advent of being able to reach more customers by combining the applications and services that we offer today with the world leading supplier of handsets, it's a good strategic situation for both parties," Knapik says.Making it happen isn't so easyWhile it may be relatively easy to add messaging into the social community context for PC users, it becomes a little more problematic for the mobile user. Knapik explains that there are three critical elements that need to be taken into account when adding messaging capabilities to the mobile social community user experience.It needs to be easily accessed on the device and that can be accomplished by either embedding it on the device or by giving it a higher placement on the device's menu. Secondly, enabling quick and easy text entry can be done via a physical or virtual qwerty keyboard. For non qwerty keyboard devices, an advanced predictive text applications will be critical. Lastly, the user needs to be able to access the social community or communities they use, and while that can be done with smartphones today it's not practical for all devices."You need to provide a user experience that doesn't try to mimic what you would see on a full size plasma display or computer monitor," Knapik says, noting that the user experience only needs to be similar not exactly the same. "And that's why we believe focusing on social messaging and the messaging aspects of popular social communities as opposed to trying replicate all the functions of social communities on a phone is exactly the right approach."Nokia's acquisition of OZ is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.

Mobile messaging moves into social communities

News | 10/22/2008 6:59 pm EDT

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