Habbo Hotel, the virtual world, is trialing a mobile version in Finland and its parent company Sulake will start rolling out various mobile services in early 2007. Habbo currently offers a payment service through mobiles but not access to the actual game - which is the exciting bit. There's a huge amount of interest building in how social nets are developing on mobiles. The big players like MySpace and YouTube will roll out major services next year and there are plenty of other sites, like BuddyPing, trying out services in that space first.
Also: MySpace/Yahoo traffic, Vodafone/Sky in Italy, trial by media in Italy, Tuvalu's domain and Amnesty.
• More social nets The excitement is that because social net users are so addicted to tweaking their profiles, keeping up with the site and - in the case of Habbo - buying furniture for their characters, allowing people to feed that addiction when they are away from their computer is a huge developing market.
Mobile phone companies are keen to push new services like music and TV because it offers them a chance to offset falling revenues from voice and text, but they are only just waking up to the fact that users just won't use web-based services on their phone because the cost has, at best, never been clear and, at worst, been a rip off.
Various networks are starting to offer broadband services for mobiles on a flat-rate monthly basis, which will be much more appealing to users because that is how most home broadband services are sold. And moving away from pay-per-minute web access to flat-rate broadband is what has driven massive broadband uptake. Amazing it took them so long, but you can form your own judgments on why it took mobile operators so long to pull their finger out.
Anyway, quite how these very complex social net sites will transfer to the web is another thing. It's logical that mobile phone photos and video could be uploaded directly to a profile, but any significant amount of writing text is infuriating on small keyboards. The designers of these services have the challenge of creating a service that will be useable on hundreds of different handsets with different keypad tools, screen sizes and other various backstage technical headaches.
I'd look to what the smaller, more experimental mobile social net guys are doing to see what these services will actually look like. Buddyping at the Open Business Minibar last Friday (hi guys, nice Cava, shame about the riot vans) were very inspiring and focus on the geo-location side. Users can send free texts, get text notification of their friends' location and can add a Buddyping widget to their MySpace (or whatever) profile that gives their current location. Photos can be sent by MMS to a Flickr account and tagged with the user's location. Yes, the "we know where you are" bit sounds a bit spooky but this is a closed network where only your friends and people you choose to network with will be shown your location - before the Daily Mail gets all excited.
Plenty more coming on this, no doubt.
• MySpace busier than Yahoo The latest comScore stats for November put MySpace above Yahoo in the US in terms of page views; MySpace has 38.7bn to Yahoo's 38.1bn. MySpace grew 2% in October alone and is up a staggering 26.2bn from November last year.
As we well know, there are lies, damn lies and web statistics - so there's usually something else going on under the surface. In this case, Yahoo's growing use of Ajax technology (which updates selected content on pages in real time, without having to refresh) might be one reason for an apparent 'drop' in traffic. From AP.
A different report from Amberlight looked into MySpace usage by country and found that people in the UK disclose more personal information than those in China, amongst other things.
The report compared the user experiences in the UK and China as well as Germany, Italy and France; consultant Robert Gillham said users in different countries have different objectives for using social net sites. In China, he said users are more cautious about giving personal information and that this has obvious implications for the design of social networking tools - and helps explain why Western sites have so far failed to outperform home grown Chinese rivals.
• Vodafone & Sky partner on mobile TV in Italy Vodafone's Italian group has signed a deal with Sky Italia to offer mobile TV. Content will be free until the end of March and available to Vodafone subscribers within Italy, reports MarketWatch.
• Trial by media in Italy Apparently it's common for the Italian press run news stories speculating on and commenting on the names of murderers before they have been proven guilty. Yesterday, front pages of most of Italy's newspapers carried headlines accusing a Tunisian immigrant of mudering his wife, son, mother-in-law and a neighbour at the family's home in northern Italy.
Azouz Marzouk was actually back in Tunisia visiting relatives, and had to fly back to Italy when he heard that his family had been slaughtered. Corriere della Sera printed a front-pgae editorial acknowledging that it is "always wrong to create monsters". More on Reuters.
• Former MySpace chair I can't help think this is a bit of a come-down, but former MySpace chair Richard Rosenblatt is flogging .tv domains as part of his new 'Demand Media' incarnation. He's hoping the rise of web video will inspire people to create their own online video channel; Tuvalu's nifty domain name should the the cherry on that particular cake but it's not cheap. Rather over-attentive story on Reuters, anyway.
• New stuff Amnesty is running a blog covering Irene Khan's mission to Lebanon and Israel.
