ET reports today that mobile phone handset manufacturers are pre-loading social networking tools and applications on their handsets. I think this is one of the most important pieces of news for the mobile social networking industry as such.

  • For users, it means that they can now save hassles of downloading and installing the application.
  • For telcos (operators like Vodafone and Airtel), it means better revenues from GPRS usage for these social networking apps (ARPUs are falling by the day and increasingly mobile companies are looking at revenues from VAS).
  • For Social Networks, it means larger user base and ease of adoption with every handset that is sold.
  • And finally for Handset Manufacturers, it means yet another selling point for their handsets. Although users would not have a network of choice but a network atleast.

I am not sure how would this impact adoption of social networking in India. Actually adoption goes hand in hand with tools. You like a social network, you demand and seek the tools to access it. And once you have the tools to do things, you tinker around with them and get hooked onto the networks. A classical positive feedback loop.

Social network adoption also depends on the friend circle of the user. Social networking is no longer about meeting new people or discovering friends but is about staying in touch with people you already know or people who share common interests. A user would thus want to choose a social network where all his friends hang out. With a social networking app pre-loaded on the handsets, at least a user would give it a try, if not use it all the time (with openID and data portability, a time shall come when all networks would be able to talk to each other. This probably would be a time when a user could be on any network and yet connect with a user on a totally different network. This should accelerate new network adoption etc).

IMHO social networking on mobiles in India is taking so much time to take off because …

  1. Low end mobile phone handsets - until your handsets are capable of running Java applications, most (all?) social networking apps simply would not work.
  2. Low penetration of GPRS
  3. Downloading and Installation issues.

With pre-loaded software, one of the three big hassles have been taken care of. Next logical step for social networks should be to talk to telcos and get discounts on GPRS usage or some kind of incentive mechanism for users to actually start using social networking.

This also has lessons for other online businesses. For example if a Cleartrip.com or TheStorez.com is able to embed a widget in mobile phone handsets, it will give users yet another quick and default option to book that ticket or order that book faster.

What other factors do you think influence mobile social networking adoption in India? Which networks will you bet your money on? And what other implications do you think this embedding would have?