Green Tea Ice Cream

Warning: This is a slightly confused post about a confusing area.

I’m optimistic about the mobile web (unlike some).  Yes, it’s been a failure in terms of the ambitions set for it (the New York Times cites 13% of mobile users accessing the web compared to 70% of computer users) but 13% of, well, pretty much everyone is still a critical mass of users.  Last December, UK users accessed the web 15.9 million times through their mobile phones.  This Christmas, one might reasonably expect this to double or quadruple considering the impact of not so much the iPhone as the number of clones and existing web-enabled phones highlighting the mobile web, not to mention the ever-improving user experience it involves.

The major issue has been the hype equating the mobile experience to the desktop experience - the opportunity is in increasing amounts of R&D that focuses on what mobile users actually need rather than trying to squash the PC experience into a laughably inappropriate little box (Publishing 2.0 has a great post on this).

What got me thinking about this earlier, though, was when a colleague organising a conference came in to ask me about whether we should look at graduate recruitment in Second Life (KPMG and others have had some success with this but I still maintain that the real value is in PR and brand-building).  My response was yes, but more fertile ground might be the impact of developments in the mobile web in the same sector and how this interacts with the migration of social networks (good stuff from Open Gardens) onto mobile (the last two links being mobile social network propositions that go straight to the mobile web and elide the ‘old’ web altogether).  Comparatively few graduates (check the SL demographics) have a Second Life but they’ve all got (sweeping generalisation alert!) mobile phones and Facebook accounts.

This opens up yet more questions:

1. What will the the mobile social web feel like?  How will it work?
2. When every mobile phone has global positioning included as a default, what will that do to social networks?  Will you allow Facebook apps to access your GPS, given that at some point, a lot of your ambient Facebook activity is going to migrate?  What will happen then?
3. And what would a mobile SL look like that hooked up to your existing social networks (yes, I know that Comverse put out an SL mobile app but it seems more like instant messaging to me)?  Would it lead to a complete dissolution of the sense-making barrier between SL and RL?  After all, your average Facebook profile is every bit as elaborately constructed as a SL avatar in terms of the meanings you want others to ascribe to it.

Another number - there were 2.7 billion mobile phones in use at the end of 2006 vs 850m PCs.  The last from a killer post on Communities Dominate Brands who have a list of other slightly scary comparatives