MoSoNe: Mobile Social Networks: 1 - Enriched Proximity

I'm grateful to the good people at Mobile Monday London who were kind enough to ask me to speak on a panel about mobile social networks this week. It's been eight years since I wrote my book Mobile Commerce: Opportunities, Applications and Technologies of Wireless Business and this was a great opportunity for me to assess how some of the stuff I wrote about then has come to pass – and how some of it hasn't... Yet.

The parts of the book that were the most fun to write were those about how society might change as a result of ubiquitous mobile connectivity. Howard Rheingold made a much better attempt at covering this ground, and I recommend you read his wonderfully thoughtful and articulate book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution rather than mine.

My feeling today is that mobile has indeed changed the way we all work and live – but that it hasn't yet brought us together with our immediate environment in quite the way I envisaged.

Mobile technology is darned good these days. I have (pretty much) all the services and apps I could want on a device that's small, reliable and good value for money. So the screen could be better, the battery could last longer, and there could be more room for skis in the back – but I expect device and service attributes to carry on improving in quality.

Mobile has made less of an advance on hooking us into our immediate physical and social situation. My GPS function can tell me where I am on the face of the planet, but it tells me nothing about the people around me. The built environment remains strangely silent too, whereas I'd kind of assumed that, by now, the Tate Modern would be telling me about itself and its exhibits as I walked around.

And I had a moment of personal revelation at MoMo this week. As I was spouting from the panel, folks in the audience were tweeting. As I wailed about mobile technology's failure to ignite relationships in the room, people around me were in fact communicating with virtual groups that overlapped the room's boundaries. There was more in-flight intelligence in that physical space than I could see or touch.

My good friend Jonathan Greensted of Sentient had asked me to be involved in the event, because we've been talking about Sentient's Bluehoo app throughout its (very rapid) development and launch. Now I'm wondering how Bluehoo and Twitter fit together. The evening's second panel made the same point: how can discovery methods be merged with social networks to produce more value?

I want my mobile device to help me meet real people. That's not because I'm on the prowl, or the mooch. Say I'm at a conference – it's only natural that I should want to find people to interact with as fast as possible. Knowing their interests and no-go areas would help maximise my time at such events. These are situations in which it's okay to wear a label, and to read other people's labels.

But the same principle applies increasingly in the workplace. (Or the blurred real-life/workplace.) Every organisation I work with is increasingly complex. The large ones are highly distributed and navigating them can be difficult – although, oddly, it's often easier for an outsider to connect the dots than it is for people on the inside. Small organisations are highly connected to others, making their value chains complex. Solutions like Bluehoo can give people back ownership of their organisations by letting them build real-time, concern-centric networks. They can be re-threading our necessarily fragmented organisations in their own image, to serve their own, collaborative, purposes. Then, when people get together, they're really getting somewhere.

Mobile technology is doing a great job at shrinking distance – making one's physical separation from people and information increasingly irrelevant. The user experience will only get better. But the industry also needs to invest in the local power of mobility. People don't just want reduced distance, they also want enriched proximity.