Social networking - a story about a man named Harold Crick and his wristwatch.

I was watching Stranger than Fiction last night, and in some ways it reminded me that we are becoming our own Karen Eiffel, narrating our own lives through posts/twitters/blogs/IM’s. Glenn is brushing his teeth 56 times, Glenn is walking 102 steps to catch the tram. It also concerns me about the increasing amount of time we now spend on telling people what we are doing at the expense of what we could be doing.

I see this improving with automated location - a Twittervision teamed up with Dodgeball tied to an IP/mobile provider, gone local. Now we just need something to automate emotion, next level smiley faces ;)

Yahoo! seem to be having another crack at social networking, with Yahoo! Mosh, after their failed attempt with Yahoo!360, which I thought nailed the UI but was far too slow and needed that all important critical reach which it never achieved in the face of the myspace storm. While still hidden from us preview over at Techcrunch doesn’t look too inspiring, and I can’t help thinking there really need some outstanding functionality to compete with team Facebook.

More interesting is Nokia’s attempt of the same name, I think the mobile manufacturers have real potential to infiltrate the social networking space. The numbers add up, 15% of the worlds population bought a mobile in ’06 (MIC), a 25% increase from the previous year, around the 2.3 billion mark now, frightening stats. Around a third in the US accessed the mobile web in some form, the WIFI’d N95’s and iPhones of this world will help push this percentage up. Let’s hope Nokia get it right, they have a history of developing great ideas for apps that seem to get lost in the execution, ala Music Recommenders.

And I’m still waiting for the master profile login, a .net passport profile done right. One to keep an eye on will be the Google influenced Socialstream, certainly looks like the one to watch in this space.