What’s driving adoption?

But there is more to social computing than social networking. Media sharing has become big news for all the wrong reasons, with tabloid tales of illegal music and movie downloading now commonplace. Yet such sharing takes on a totally different perspective when it comes to social computing: think about it more in terms of an environment where you can share your family photo albums (Flickr) or snapshots (Twitter), or even your video clips (YouTube). Some 5% of all European cellphone owners upload photos to the web directly from their cellphones, according to Forrester.

Although well-known brands such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube dominate media coverage of social computing, mobility is throwing up new services and applications that are totally original. Take geosocial networking. ABI Research has estimated that location-aware mobile social networking revenue alone will account for US$3.3 billion by 2013. Location Based Services (LBS) are now being accessed by one in three smartphone users, according to web analytics company Compete, which also found that almost 75% of the LBS applications used on the iPhone are commercial products. It would seem that LBS is already realizing the potential for monetization of mobile social computing. Compete also found that LBS users will spend more on their network contracts than others, making them a hot property for carriers.

But to truly understand the impact of mobile social computing, you need to go beyond the web-based notion of social networking – beyond even the emerging geolocation services – to focus on the core competencies of the mobile handset: voice communication and text messaging. Mix these with everything else we know about social computing and the true power of the medium starts to emerge, courtesy of services such as Nimbuzz and eBuddy, which let you discover where your friends are, what they’re doing and which of them are available to chat (via VoIP) or text (via multiple IM chat services) right this minute.

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Engaging mobile users

For many people, the real innovation of bringing mobility into the social computing mix has been to engage the user in breaking news around the world as never before. No longer is news something to be experienced from a distance, as a spectator. Now consumers can be part of the story by capturing the event in real time, be that by delivering still images and video of the story itself, or by being part of the discussion surrounding it. News has become truly interactive for the first time, and only mobile social computing can currently deliver this immersive media experience: to shape as well as break the news.