One of the reasons I am loving working with the social media portfolio at the moment is that I get to work on really cutting edge projects that blend some of the newer services that a mobile network operator can offer with the social media experience I have.  The project I am focussed on most of the time right now is a locative social network called The Grid.

Since I joined we have released the firt two versions of a Java application for mobile handsets that offers the following services:

1. You can connect to people and chat with them
2. You can see where your friends are on a map
3. You can leave content on places, via MMS, SMS, wap and web
4. You can find content left by other people nearby to your location

Below are some screenshots:

	The images above illustrate the buddy list, the mapping, the ability to get driving directions between yourself and blips or friends and the view of images uploaded via wap or MMS.

During the 3 month period I’ve been working with the Grid team we have rebranded the service, launched the Java application and taken it through two version releases, made several over-arching strategic technology decisions that will change the way we do things in the future, planned and launched several marketing campaigns and achieved countless smaller victories required to gather the kind of momentum we have now.

Given that locative services are quite broadly applicable, there are several different ways to understand what this platform does. It provides location services using cellular mast triangulation, not GPS, to determine where you are, it is also a platform for user-generated content that gets enhanced by locatiion data, it is a social platform for communication and sharing, and it is a multimedia hosting environment that can deliver location-specific media. What makes it an exciting project to work on is that we are really leveraging the best tech the network has to offer and turning it into a comprehensive and, more importantly, comprehensible consumer product that fits neatly between the traditional Web 2.0/Social Media type of offering and a mobile offering.

The personal irony, I suppose, is that I find myself increasingly less confident in the usefulness of the desktop internet. As mobile browsers get stronger and mobile broadband becomes more accessible the one thing that sticks out is how expensive it is to market a web site aimed at the desktop market compared to mobile. When you look at the numbers it becomes aparent that for the cost of every one desktop web user you can probably get 5 mobile users and its much easier for them to transact in the mobile space, especially for micro-payments.

Of course there are the down-sides like the complexity of rich application development, the lack of consistency between HTML rendering engines on the various phone platforms and the relative richness of the desktop web with technologies like AJAX and other 2.0 goodness.

A few weeks ago I did a journalism project with 3rd year students at the University of Pretoria, which resulted in them doing locative journalism in their city using photos, video and text and using a map to tell the story. The results, as far as I can tell, have been good and we start the formal asessment process tomorrow. I’ll post some samples here when I have them.

The experience, however, seemed to represent a significant paradigm shift for most of the students as far as both the technology and the implications for story-telling are concerned, and I come across this quite often when I try explaining what I do. Often the best way is to show people because it sounds too weird when explained in the abstract. I find myself saying things like “the physical world is now a navigation system for data”, or “maps are no longer the meta-data, the physical world is the meta-data” and so on.

But, existential questions aside, if you want to try it, SMS ‘download’ to 33313. My username is vincentmaher, add me as a friend and look at my blips.