Mobile phones are clearly becoming the preferred medium for communication by users across the globe. Having crossed the 300-million subscriber mark, mobile penetration in India has far surpassed the penetration of PCs in the country. No wonder every online application wants to go mobile. And social networking platforms are no exception.

Not a very new phenomenon to India, mobile social networking was attempted as far back as 2006 by Yaari.com, which never really took off. But the timing now seems right for social networking on the go.

Global projections indicate a bright future for mobile social networking, with the percentage of mobile social network users as a percentage of mobile phone users rising from 4.3% in 2008 to 18.8% by 2012 - according to the statistics of the European Information Technology Observatory.

Reliance ADA Group’s social networking platform BigAdda has gone mobile with its MobileAdda platform which includes key features like friend search, sending invitations from the phonebook, communicating with your friend list through text, voice and photo ‘scribbles’ and updates, alerts and notifications. Other online platforms that have mobile versions are ibibo.com and Indyarocks.

Social networking sites are becoming a trend with handset companies, who are offering new phones pre-loaded with these sites. LG Mobile has partnered up with Mobile 2.0 service provider RockeTalk to upload a social networking application on its handsets. Similarly, Samsung Mobile has tied up with ShoZu, for pre-loading social networking software on select Samsung phones.

Recognizing the future trends toward innovative VAS applications, Spice Mobiles has launched social networking and instant messaging services in its product portfolio through an exclusive tie up with ibibo and Nimbuzz for VAS offerings on its products. The company believes that such innovative VAS applications would influence the consumer’s buying decisions in the future.

Mr. Kunal Ahooja, CEO, Spice Mobiles said, “With soaring mobile usage and penetration, the Indian VAS market is witnessing phenomenal growth. As the mobile handset is increasingly becoming the device of choice when it comes to listening to music, connecting to Internet, clicking photos and VAS, our innovations and offerings bundled with Spice handsets are in line with our mission to provide our consumers a more engaging and fulfilling experience.”

An emerging trend is the rise of social media developed specifically for mobile phones. These stand-alone platforms do not have online PC counterparts. RockeTalk is one such application, which can be downloaded on an Internet-enabled mobile handset. Another platform looking to target the Indian market is Qeep, Cologne-based Blue Lion Mobile’s product. Qeep, which can be downloaded for free, offers interactive features like private messaging, photo-blogging, live multi-player gaming, sound attacks and QMS, a special kind of text message designed for Qeep. Its founders claim that India already constitutes 20% of its 300,000 users.

The rising popularity of mobile social networking coupled with India’s phenomenal subscriber growth rate spells good news for MVAS and application providers working to develop new and innovative applications for mobile phones.

Social networking in India gained prominence with the advent of the popular web portal Orkut.com. Since then, international and local players have flooded the social networking space. Facebook.com with its slew of entertainment applications has slowly gained popularity that is now being challenged by News-Corp.-owned MySpace.com, which launched its India specific portal in September 2008.

While the global sites battle it out for supremacy, several local players have made their way into the social scene. These include Reliance ADA Group’s BigAdda.com and Fropper.com, which is owned by People Interactive (I) Pvt. Ltd.

BigAdda.com announced last month, that it has crossed the 3 million mark in terms of the number of users registered on the site - an impressive achievement within such a short span of time (15 months to be exact).

As the trend toward mobile social networking gradually emerges, BigAdda has lost no time launching its social networking platform for the mobile phone – MobileAdda – to gain an edge over the competition.

With the plethora of networking sites offering a variety of applications, it becomes difficult for new players to compete. BigAdda is focusing on community building as a way of attracting users. According to Mr. Nikhil Soman, CTO, BigAdda “The depth of services offered in our adda products, as in ‘own your community’ is a complete community driver and is unique to us and attracts users. Secondly, the differentiating local access-using mobile platform as in MOBILEADDA unlike the global platforms gives BIGADDA a localised flavor, local taste and renders topicality.”

It is interesting to note that, according to statistics released by BigAdda, while the metros (Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai) contribute 50% of the users, the remaining 50% actually come from Tier II & III towns like Pune, Nagpur, Chandigarh, Vishakapatnam, Allahbad etc., indicative of the breadth of BigAdda’s appeal. The site’s user base is predominantly constituted by the youth - almost 85% of the registered users are between the age group of 18 to 30 years.
In this crowded market, BigAdda has big ambitions to establish itself as India’s leading youth networking site. Shivanandan Pare, COO, BIGADDA said, “We are actively working towards taking our registered user base to 10 million in India at the earliest and for this we will continue to launch innovative products that appeal to a wider base of people; both our existing users and to attract new users. In fact, launching BIGADDA on mobile recently was a step in this direction which has so far received a great response.”