RE: Final Report Editing.

Hi All,

As agreed with Harry and Christine we wanted to provide a brief insight on the Mobile social Networking phenomenon evolution, this paragraph focuses on a few main keypoints:
o       Impact of the mobile social networking on the adotion of Mobile Web
o       How Mobile access can improve online Social Networking experience
o       Focus on the current lack of standards
o       Focus on dichotomy between using dedicated Mobile Applications or Mobile Browsers to access online Social Networks

Please find it and provide any feedback/comment/revision to improve it

Regards
Claudio

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More and more people are adopting SmartPhones and have constant access to the Internet. Browsing the Web from mobile is a growing phenomenon and online  Social Networking sites are playing a key role. Mobile users are much  more active on social networks than PC users a GSMA and ComScore take data on mobile phone usage direct from the UK operators and highlight how mobile users are spending more minutes per day on social networking sites than PC users.
Furthermore Facebook in 2009 has become the most popular mobile destination in UK leaving Google behind. The same statistics unveil that in US three mobile social networks (Facebook, MySpace and AOL/BEBO) are within the top ten visited mobile Web sites. Comscore revealed also that in 2010 30% of smartphone users accessed social networks via mobile browsers, while this was up from 22.5% in 2009. Total social networking access via mobile browsers on all mobile phones rose to 11.1%, while this was up from 6.5% in 2009.
Successful social networking platforms are designed to permit users  to access from the device of their choice. The users' default access depends on the available options and the cost of those options.
If the cost of different access is equivalent, users seem attracted to mobile device access because they can consult their friends and network quickly and make decisions based on what they learn/hear/see.
The compelling distinctive aspects between mobile access to a social network from Mobile rather then a PC are mainly:
1) It may be an interstitial activity (bus stop...)
2) Availability everywhere everytime,
3) context awareness (location, activities, surrounding's
information)
With respect to context awareness there are already several mobile social sites that let you both share your location and see the location of your friends.
The alliance, called OSLO (Open Sharing of Location-based Objects) includes many players in mobile social networking and location-based social software which have signed an agreement to enable their approx. 30 million users to share location information and interact between networks.
Many popular social networks at the time of the writing of this  report offer both a Web-based version for mobile device users AND an dedicated application which can be downloaded for smartphones from  app stores (typically at no cost) which make much greater use of built in sensors on the devices.
The W3C Device API WG is quickly filling the gap by standardizing a  set of standard API to be implemented by mobile browsers to gain access to device functionalities within a Web Application running inside a standard mobile browser.

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Received on Tuesday, 14 September 2010 10:04:18 UTC