OZ Making a Power Move at Mobile Social Networking
by Aner Ravon

Last week I wrote about the future of Mobile Instant Messaging. Montreal based OZ is taking the next step. Following Pete Cashmore’s exclusive yesterday, OZ announced its new product - mobile social networks:

 

“OZ, the leading mobile messaging solution provider, today announced its mobile social networking product. With over 400 million social networking users around the world, this solution will enable consumers to easily access the most popular social networking sites on their mobile phones. …

Apparently, the OZ new product will support Social Networking sites such as Flickr, Bebo, MySpace, YouTube, Blogger. The product will be available to carriers during Q1 of 2007. OZ carrier customers, including Sprint-Nextel, Cingular Wireless and T-Mobile are expected to be the prime beneficiaries.

For OZ this is a great move although not one without hurdles. Mobilizing social networks is the natural next step for mobile IM and Email - two products nearing exhaustion in terms of consumer potential. This is definitely the right direction for OZ in terms of increasing value to existing and new customers.

It does present a few challenges though. For start, having a client is nice but a commercial agreement must be reached between each carrier and each social network before deployment can take place. Having the client provides an edge, but no immediate business.  I certainly hope YouTube, Flickr and Bebo won’t choke the market as AOL, MSN and Yahoo did and that they will grant content and licensing rights to 3rd party developers. This will make OZ a reseller which is what OZ is really aiming at. Still, I imagine MySpace and Flickr will at least try to deal with Cingular, Sprint and T-Mobile directly and therefore limit OZ’s value to deployment only. In addition, I assume their mobile divisions will launch mobile 3rd party programs that will allow other enablers to step in and compete.

The other significant challenge is with the client itself. It will be really challenging to package Flickr, YouTube and MySpace into one Java client and to support video, audio, commenting and so forth. I have a feeling the experience won’t be that good and that a lot of ideals will need to be compromised. The services are very media savvy and require incorporation of too different flows. Unlike IM or Email, there is less of an immediate communication benefit here and less of “rational” incentive to download, so the user experience must rock.

At the bottom line, it’s early and I believe the market is still up for grabs. OZ, however, has taken a crucial first step, not for the first time. They have done it once with Mobile IM, putting a lot of weight on the need for AIM / MSN / Yahoo multiheaded client, a gamble that has paid off big time. Let’s see who else joins the party and how.

Aner Ravon
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