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AT&T and Verizon Wireless Introduce Mobile Social Networking Applications

6:35 am on September 11, 2008 | Category: Software, Telecom Services, Web Services, Wireless

America’s leading cell phone carriers, AT&T and Verizon Wireless, are introducing new applications to make it easier for customers to engage in social networking on their mobile phones.

AT&T’s ‘My Communities’ service (which costs $2.99/month), and Verizon’s competing ‘SocialLife’ application (costing just $1.49/month), allow subscribers to monitor a number of social networks via a single source. Both applications were developed by Intercasting Corp., a social networking and mobile media company that works with wireless carriers to offer web services on mobile devices.

The list of social networks accessible through both services include MySpace; as well as niche ethnic networking sites: AsiaAve, BlackPlanet and MiGente; an online Christian community called FaithBase; and a gay and lesbian-oriented community called GLEE.

By subscribing to SocialLife or My Communities, cell phone users will be able to post comments on any of these sites, or upload photos to their profiles, all from one place.

The big question, of course, is whether users will be willing to pay carriers for such a service, when it is possible to visit social networking sites directly using the pre-installed browser on any internet-enabled phone.

“The problem with launching all this stuff is that it smacks a little of the walled garden,” commented Sanford C. Bernstein analyst, Craig Moffett. “Once you have a Web-enabled phone, and more people are getting those, you donâ€™t need to have your wireless carrier manage this.”

Furthermore, neither of the services offers access to Facebook, which is second only to MySpace in the U.S. social networking market.

AT&T’s director of premium wireless content, Rob Hyatt, however, insists that a service like My Communities will be very helpful to novice users who are not familiar with the mobile internet.

“There are a lot of ways to get to a community, some easy, some not,” Hyatt explained. “This is organized for you and in one place.”

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