Mobile Communities and Emerging Swarms

Everyday we read about mobile social networking becoming more prevalent.  With the iPhones breakthrough in the mobile web browsing experience and overall UI (and others have followed suit), the limitations of using new types of content (maps, pictures, clips, songs) into social networking posts and communications via mobiles has been dramatically reduced.  As a result, we are seeing an explosion in mobile communities.  Facebook recently reported over 100 million of its 400 million users are actively accessing the site via their mobile devices.  New communities such as itmy.com (www.itsmy.com) which was born in the UK and allows personal profile pages with active sharing of apps, music, videos, etc. has been growing dramatically with over 2.5 million users,  Another one is Gypsii (www.Gypsii.com) , born in the Netherlands and now in most of the world, which is adding over 500,000 users a month and focuses on connecting the real and virtual world through linking information to location and user preferences.  The average Gypsii user stays on 4 hours per day!  Fring (www.fring.com) is another interesting community focused on building a phone network out of its users.  It supports free VoIP calling among all users and can interconnect with other VoIP services like Skype.  And finally, there is Yelp (www.yelp.com) with over 25 million users providing real-time collective feedback on everything from restaraunts and hotels to events and shows.  It has basically displaced the traditional static Zagat-type rating services.

These communities are becomiung empowered to provide unique benefits to their participants and are great examples of what Howard Rheingold calls the "gift economy"  I see them as the Digital Swarms that will shape the way we live and work in the future.  Because there is power in numbers and mobile devices give us the platform to harness over 4 billion people to build these communities.  Now that's powerful.