What Mobile Operators Should Learn from Facebook

Facebook has in just a couple of weeks, without a shred of doubt, the hottest development platform to launch one's Web 2.0 business on. CNet News surprisingly had two different articles on Facebook apps headlined for two consecutive days. It's the Oklahoma land rush again, and I sleep in anxiety every night knowing that I'm missing out on this next big thing!

Let it be known however, that I work in a much slower moving industry. That is, I toil for a firm ( funded by Hale Fund Management ) that provides solutions to mobile operators. Everyone who has worked in this space knows that deploying new applications in the mobile operators network is a in excruciating drawn out process that at a minimum takes a quarter to deploy and deployments that last several years are not uncommon. The unfortunate reality is that telcos have never learned how to deploy services at the same lightning speed as internet firms.

There are many lessons that telcos can learn from the likes of Google, Yahoo and Amazon. However, I want to focus specifically on the innovations happening at Facebook. Facebook's strength is that it has virtual control of a user's internet identity. I wrote earlier about the telcos needing a change of culture from that of one of scarcity to one of abundance. The telcos also need to change the perspective from one of control of one's access to communication to one of control of access to one's identity.

Telcos, mobile operators specifically, are ideally positioned to own a user's identity. The mobile phone if you haven't noticed is a ubiquitous gadget so much so that in Japan 'keitai denwa' is 'the sole means of contact known'. In Finish, its informally as "kannykka" or "little hand", in short an appendage you can't do without. The mobile phone is always with you, its the primary means for friends to contact you and its the primary means for you to keep in contact with them. Clearly the lessons of Facebook's social utility are ever so relevant.

So let's try to learn something from Facebook's success. To begin, let's look at Facebooks two core principles:

1. You should have control over your personal information.
Facebook helps you share information with your friends and people around you. You choose what information you put in your profile, including contact and personal information, pictures, interests and groups you join. And you control the users with whom you share that information through the privacy settings on the My Privacy page.

2. You should have access to the information others want to share.
There is an increasing amount of information available out there, and you may want to know what relates to you, your friends, and people around you. We want to help you easily get that information.

Sharing information should be easy. And we want to provide you with the privacy tools necessary to control how and with whom you share that information.

It's utterly simple, humans communicate because they need to share, however they certainly care who they share with. Telcos have always focused on communication however as the world has change they should increasing focus on how their subscribers share information about themselves.

From these basic principles we can derive some recommendations:

1. People want to share their relationships - Blogging rose in popularity because people wanted to share their thoughts to the world. Facebook however is different, it's about sharing your relationships. With Facebook one has a news feed that reveals when your friends make new friends, when they interact with other people, what groups they join and so forth. Most interactions do not occur online, they occur offline. Offline is where a mobile phone is most accessible.
2. People want privacy - It's strikingly unique in that the one's profile page isn't accessible unless you login. In short, there's no such concept as an anonymous viewer (or perhaps stalker). Privacy controls on a mobile phone should be a default proposition.
3. People want to keep in contact - In the extremely mobile world we live in where not everyone stays put in their home town, it's critically important that we remain in contact with people in far flung areas. Even if a friend that you invite is someone you may not want to keep in frequent contact with. There's always that need that 5 years from now, or in some far flung you may want them to be accessible. The mobile phone's accessibility ensures that one can access one's contacts when one least expects it.
4. People want all their social software in one place - Facebook started out with its own photo sharing, status updates, events, groups etc., although these features where inferior to what others had in the markeplace (i.e. flickr, twitter, typepad etc) Facebook continued its massive growth. There is extreme benefit to having one's identity and associated profile to be not only in one virtual place but everywhere accessible.
5. People have their own technology preferences - Facebook however has come to realize that people have their own preferences as to how best to collect this information. The Facebook platform now allows users to include information from their flickr photosets, amazon wishlists, del.icio.us bookmarks and so forth. Facebook has become something like the mashup portal play like netvibes, however in complete reverse, that is the audience is not you, rather the audience is your friends. Mobile operators should stop assuming that the only applications that are worth while are the one's it builds itself. The switching costs of social networking are too high for most to consider transition to a mobile operators offerings.
6. Exert programmatic control to what third party applications can do - MySpace problem today is that form the beginning, they've never exerted any control of what can be placed on one's own page. This has led to hideous looking pages and pages that include malicious scripts that can hack into your identity. In the absence of controls, Myspace has taken overly draconian measure to ban all service whether useful or not. Facebook's however has designed a platform that ensures that third party applications follow the rules. Rules are more effectively applied if it's built in rather than enforced after the fact. It's critical that mobile operators provide APIs that allow small and large companies to contribute functionality painlessly into the network.
7. Offline behavior drives online usage - In an article by Nissan Gabbay, one of the key success factors of Facebook was that daily offline social behavior (i.e. daily interaction of college students) drove usage of the site. It's critical to identify offline behavior and complementing it with applications on the mobile phone.

Clearly there's a lot of opportunity for mobile operators to move into this space. The key however will be that of having the appropriate technologies and deployed infrastructure to make the above recommendations above economically viable. One would assume that the existence of these technologies are still in the works, unfortunately that assumption would be in error. The group I work with is currently deploying this infrastructure is several smaller North American mobile operators. As always, we should see innovation happening first for the smaller guys before we see it with the more established brands.