There wasn’t much porn at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this month. The traditional driver of new technologies (think Super 8 movies, cable TV, VCRs) was refreshingly absent from the show, apart from one or two sleazy little booths tucked into the far back corner of one of the more remote halls. Instead it looks like one of the key drivers of the next wave of mobile technology development will be social networking - kids furiously updating each other, by text, instant message and wall postings to say that “OMG - I’m on the train – LoL”.
Motorola wittily made the most of the trend by advertising one of its handsets as ‘the first phone with social skills’. Samsung made a huge noise about its Wave handset, and was careful to include what could be described as a social networking dashboard, which gathers and presents all your texts, mail, instant messages, Twitter feeds, and Facebook and MySpace statuses in one place. Companies such as Nokia and Palm are developing similar features on their latest devices, trying to differentiate themselves through ease-of-use features such as continuous connections for instant updates, sophisticated synchronisation schemes and seamless back-up.
So the maelstrom of social presence will continue to whirl ever faster, as handsets become more sophisticated and networks develop to cope. The arrival of services such as Skype on mobile handsets may even create a gateway for that constant ‘next big thing’ – video chat. If you’ve grown up with the technology and been through university with helicopter parents insisting on weekly Skype calls ‘to keep in touch’, perhaps mobile video chat will make sense as one of your many social networking tools.
There are two interesting aspects to this trend to mobile social networking. The first is the rise of new forms of relationships, in which maintaining a shallow virtual presence in many friends’ lives displaces deeper in-person relationships with fewer friends. If you’ve ever seen a couple out for dinner, sitting opposite each other but texting absent friends, you’ll know what I mean.
The second interesting aspect to mobile social networking is the way in which it is funnelling so many of the functions of full-blown PCs into tiny handsets whose software and hardware is being developed at a sprint. While that’s good for driving innovation, it is also leaving major questions unanswered. Security, for example, is a much bigger issue on handsets than desktops. Why? Because the accessibility of handsets will increase the amount of social networking that people do with a consequent increase in the opportunities for unwanted information leakage, and because of the potential of location information, and because of handsets’ links to payment schemes.
Technologists are doing a relatively good job of controlling attacks on handsets. A panel at MWC suggested that there had only been hundreds of different attacks on handsets to date, compared with hundreds of thousands a day on PCs. But there’s no accounting for human behaviour – among an audience of people keenly interested in mobile security, about 20% had left their handset’s Bluetooth connections open, while only about one in ten was using a SIM password as well as the keyboard lock.
Apps downloads, universal widgets, mobile banking and money transfer schemes, NFC travel passes and ID systems will all pile further complexity on to handset makers, operating system developers, and network operators. This concatenation of complexity is going to keep everyone busy for years to come. Mobile porn will just have to look after itself.
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