Today Verizon Wireless and AT&T both announced they are using Intercasting Corp’s ANTHEM platform to provide their subscribers a single interface to the social networking category. Also, I am happy to note that MySpace is now also part of our social networking partner lineup, as is Photobucket.
Verizon Wireless has chosen to brand their one-stop social networking category “SocialLife” while AT&T is calling it “My Communities.” There are some differences between the two deployments, and they chose to offer slightly different social networking sites, (AT&T is offering more, while VZW is more focused) but overall the concept is to leverage the ANTHEM platform to provide a single interface to the social networking category.
Why ANTHEM and why this approach? There are a few reasons carriers, OEMs and social networking sites around the world find our platform valuable. Here are a few:
1) Critical mass means lower effort – For carriers and OEMs, we have already secured technical relationships with a large and growing list of social networking sites, which simplifies business development and deployment for them. For social networking sites, we have secured a broad distribution footprint, which means a single integration to our platform establishes a presence instantly to over 200 million mobile users.
2) Roadmap – Putting the whole social networking category in one place enables social communication to evolve into its role as part of the native mobile experience. The first step for most deployments is a downloadable application, then as the category becomes more important, our platform enables the entire category via a single preload. Beyond preloading, the social networking category is important because the core functionality is being treated less as an “application” and more like “integrated functionality” and that is where the OEMs come in to embed social features from third parties through our platform to high-value areas on the device like the PIM, Camera, and Active UI. (If you want to see some examples of this while at CTIA, send me an email.)
3) Flexibility – The whole ecosystem in the mobile social networking vertical wants to be as engaged with the consumer as possible. Finding an application and downloading it is a high-friction experience, and while ANTHEM can represent social networking in this way to satisfy this mode of interaction, the true value of the platform is that it enables third party functionality decoupled from its presentation layer and broken down into component parts so that it can become part of the differentiated consumer offering by different carriers, OEMs and infrastructure providers, all to the benefit of the social networking providers and consumers because this drives deeper engagement.
4) Functionality – The vast majority of access to web-based social networking sites is via WAP, so why offer an application at all? There are several reasons, and not least is functionality. Here are a few things you can do on, say, MySpace, through ANTHEM that you cannot do via WAP: You can register as a new user; you can take a picture from inside the application and upload it to your gallery or use it in a post; you can share content you find on MySpace with your friends who may not be on MySpace through our integration to the address book on your phone. It is simply a richer experience, and it is more mobile-centric. This is not to say that WAP is not currently an important part of MySpace’s offering – it is. So is a robust messaging and alerts offering. In the near-term, ANTHEM provides one more important consumer interface for a certain type of power user, and in the long run ANTHEM is the invisible DNA that enables device integration and a transparent experience that is easier to access than WAP and is simpler to use.
As we add more carriers, OEMs and social networking providers to the mobile social networking ecosystem, the consumer experience will evolve, as will the flexibility to offer more services and functionality across more and different business models. We are excited about the future of mobile social networking and our place in it as an enabler of the category.
I thank our friends at Verizon, AT&T, MySpace and Photobucket for joining the growing ecosystem that is using our platform to build a more robust mobile social networking user experience. Over the next few months I will share details of more carriers, OEMs and partners, and will eventually give a glimpse of the revolutionary technology we will be releasing soon.