You can’t swing a cat at 3GSM this year without hitting 17 mobile social networking companies, all claiming to be the next MySpace, and all claiming to be unique. Time will tell. Cerkle is one of the more interesting examples however, offering a social networking service that works from your PC and your mobile phone.
“Our belief is that social networking is evolving, and people are resolving themselves down into smaller groups,” says Paul Cox of Roundpoint, the company behind Cerkle.
“If you look at the statistics, most people use social networking more to contact people they already know and arrange to do things. They’re not going out and looking for new friends. So we’re not really trying to do the MySpace thing, as we don’t think that’s what people want in the mobile environment. And besides, you can’t deal with 700 friends on your mobile. You can deal with 10...”
Cerkle is certainly easy to use: the signup process involves registering, and then through forms creating a simple mobile internet site with information and pics. You then invite friends to join, and through the service can send each other messages. It all works through the mobile internet, although Cerkle also works in a limited fashion for people with older phones too, at least with the messaging aspects.
“There’s no application to download, which means we’ve got a very big base of people who can use it immediately,” says Cox. “We haven’t got to roll anything out. Although we have the service running now, we’re also looking to sell it to operators to run their own communities. It might be used by clubs, societies or other groups of some kind, or even small businesses that want an easier way of communicating.”
Cerkle also supports advertising within the mobile sites, and Cox says some brands may wish to create Cerkles for their audiences/readers/viewers. Safety also appears to be a big feature, as Cerkle uses your phone number as your unique identifier, asking you to sign in with a username and password if it doesn’t recognise it. Operators will also be able to restrict usage by under-18s if they want.
Cox says this focus on ‘safe’ communities gives Cerkle an advantage over the web-based social networking services. “They all start as free-for-alls, and while there’s a lot of enthusiasts out there like that, the big picture is that’s not what people want. They want safety and control, so we’re trying to address that as well.”