Telcos target social web

Kiwi Antony Beswick is spearheading a drive by technology giant Ericsson to help telcos get a piece of the action from the explosion of interest in social networking.

Mr Beswick, who grew up on a sheep farm near Wanganui and is now Ericsson's strategic product manager for social networking, based in Stockholm, unveiled a web-hosted "white label" portal at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

It lets mobile network operators provide their own-branded social networking sites that also allow customers to upload photos and videos taken with camera phones to sites such as Facebook and Bebo at the touch of a button. Facebook is the most popular internet application accessed on mobile phones by time spent browsing, according to research conducted by the GSMA, the mobile-phone industry body.

People who access Facebook on their mobiles visit on average 3.3 times a day and spend 24 minutes on it each day, a similar amount of time that users spend if accessing the site from their home PCs.

Mr Beswick says Ericsson's platform enables operators to become part of "the social web", and not merely carriers of bits and bytes.

The work sprang out of a partnership Mr Beswick struck up when working for a firm that was later acquired by Ericsson.

"I started sponsoring a start-up in Slovenia, called 3 Frame Studios, founded by a guy who had gone to the Media Design School in Auckland - another Kiwi connection - and we started looking at mobile social networking.

"For the last 18 months we have been working on 'how do you interpret Web 2.0 in a telco sense?'.

"What we are launching is a platform that enables them to become an equal peer in the ecosystem. It builds an image of the social graph - the database of 'who is friends with who' - within their networks."

Carriers that used the system could pool their contact data, so users would be able to import their Facebook contacts, find their friends' phone numbers even if they were on other networks and import them into their telco's portal.

Mr Beswick says the goal is not to pick a fight with Facebook, but he suggests Ericsson's model might spread the wealth.

"Facebook's important asset is a database that records 'who is friends with who'. That is valued at billions of dollars and is owned by a bunch of Stanford MBA graduates and 1.5 percent by Microsoft.

"Under our model there is no one single asset - the social graph is individually owned by each operator."

Another social networking site might be the last thing most consumers think they need.

"If you go to a user initially and say 'come to my Telecom NZ portal', they will say 'why?'," he concedes.

"But if the operator says 'snap a photo and upload it in real time to your favourite social networks' - that is how you attract the users."

Once on the portal, operators would offer users the opportunity to back up their contacts and then to extend friendship invitations.

Mr Beswick says interest from carriers has been huge. "You can expect the number of networks that have adopted it by the end of the year to be quite high."

- © Fairfax NZ News