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Saturday, February 03, 2007

Mobile Think Tanking

MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING

A think tank is an organization, institute, corporation, or group that conducts research, typically funded by governmental and commercial clients, in the areas of social or political strategy, technology, and armament...

Apophenia writes, “I believe that teenagers are the reason that mobile will happen sooner than we think. I don't believe that the first explosion will be US-based.”

Who is she? “My name is danah boyd and this is the "Best of Apophenia" collection page. If you want to see the full blog, click here. If you want to see my publications, click here. Enjoy!”

USA isn’t a leader in mobile. Apple iPhone and Microsoft Zune are going to add some buzz to the mobile business environment. Motorola needs to make a come-back. Nokia want’s to re-invent its US presence. LG and Sony-Ericsson are also out for a slice.

Best Of Apophenia

“Over the years, I [Apophenia] have written numerous posts about social media, social software, social networks and other industry-relevant topics. Colleagues often remark that it is difficult to sift through my personal blog to find relevant material. For that reason, i decided to put together a "best of" to highlight the essays that are most interesting to newcomers interested in social media. Right now, these are just recent essays and blog posts that deal with particular issues in depth. If you think that a particular entry should be listed here, please let me know! Better yet, add it to del.icio.us or to digg - i'm watching these sites to see what entries are particularly popular or useful.”

“I think that mobile social network-driven systems will look very different than web-based ones but the fundamentals of "friends" and "messages" and some form of presence-conveying "profile" will be core to the system,” she continues.

MARCO AHTISAARI

“The big human fundamental needs and capacities on which the growth of the mobile industry was built are social,” writes Marco Ahtisaari the son of the former Finnish President. Marco has been with Nokia and knows the mobile industry inside out. Last year he quitted and is now working with a new mission: project.

“Social interaction has arguably been the driving force of adoption of both the Internet and mobile communications, continues Marco. I agree. Web 2.0 has made the social possible on the web. But the same promises were available through IRC’s, chats and bulletin boards before the Web 2.0 and blogs. The activists are the core of the movement.

“Starting with voice call with the widest reach to SMS text messaging, e-mail, instant messaging, down to tens of millions of people reading and writing weblogs and sharing of photos with a close group. How many of these have been explicitly designed by anyone?” He writes in his blog. How many bloggers are there? 70 million, I guess today. How many are really active? I have no idea. Does anyone make blogging activity quality control?

“The ones that have succeeded have been simple open ended functionalities (e.g. SMS is 160 characters of text), based on the primitives of social interaction that leave room for human interpretation and invention.” Marco Ahtisaari writes. The simplest things are the best tools. Taking out the complexity from mobile smart phones is going to be an essential mission. But SMS isn’t easy to use. But it works.

“Consider the big human fundamental of gift giving. Has the universal human practice of gift-giving face-to-face really gone digital yet? Could it? Should it?” he continues. I think there are a number of charity networks using that part of the Internet. I’m not an expert in that field.

Who am I? [More about Danah Boyd]

My name is danah boyd and i am a PhD candidate at the School of Information (SIMS) at the University of California - Berkeley and a Fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communications. My research focuses on how people negotiate a presentation of self to unknown audiences in mediated contexts. In particular, my dissertation is looking at how youth engage with networked publics like MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube. I am interested in how the architectural differences between unmediated and mediated publics affect sociality, identity and culture. My dissertation research is being funded as a part of the MacArthur Foundation's Initiative on New Media and Learning.

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