What is old is new again – the mobile phone book is finally going social. Here’s an overview of two of the more interesting mobile phone utilities I’ve seen for making the mobile phone book more social. And mobile.
1) Zyb allows you to stay more connected with your friends by allowing them to access “their” profile on your mobile phone through a common desktop web interface. They can update your profile on them with more accurate information and other details.
In return of accepting such a connection, social elements like seeing where your friends are on a map and their current online status become possible. The application even extends to your calendar and gives you the ability to leave messages in their profile… or send group SMS messages.
All very cool – but Zyb was limited to only a few types of mobile phones when I was walked through a live demo at the world mobile congress in February.
That has all changed in the last few months. First they were bought out by Vodaphone and now they offer their social phone book product across most platforms – including the iPhone.
You can view my six minute interview / demo on the product (albeit an earlier version) from WMC here:
Or check out their one minute promo video here:
2) Mobile social network itsmy.com recently extended their platform to also include a social phone book for the mobile internet. There is no application download necessary and all features can easily be handled with every mobile browser at http://m.itsmy.com.
If you have access to the mobile web, you can create an interactive social phone book with a few clicks.
The mobile web phone book consists of single contacts with all profile details from your friends like phone numbers, pictures, links to favourite mobile sites, but also has many social features like direct access to community actions, messaging, sharing and voting.
They also have plans to allow people to add mobile videos and location to their phone book and links back to their own platform/channels.
Since launching this service in the U.S., itsmy.com has seen an increase of logins to their site by 24% and 12% additional volume of picture and video uploads.
Antonio Vince Staybl, CEO of itsmy.com says: “We will transfer the complete personal phone book from the mobile device into the mobile web, make it social and add every possible feature including voice and video calls.”
itsmy.com is the off-deck, operator independent mobile community with more than 2 million mobile users, 4.5 million mobile home- and content pages containing 10 million mobile UGC-items. Mobile 2.0 social networking services like free homepages, messaging, personal mobile TV channels and location based services make itsmy.com a very sticky mobile community. itsmy.TV is also the world’s largest personal mobile broadcasting service.
You can view my interview/overview of the service here:
Marketers can look for monetization opportunities through ad-serving on the phone book platforms in the near future.
I can hardly wait 🙂