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I couldn't agree more with Mike Arrington on his post regarding social networks on mobile devices. Whether he coined the phrase used as my title remains open but when I read it in one of his responses in the comments section to above mentioned post I wanted to link to it. In essence, what social networks on mobiles do is exactly that: remove friction from the social interaction process. I have written multiple times in the past about how I believe social interaction needs to be facilitated by technology. Making social networks easily available on the phone is exactly the key step in this direction. Mike also correctly notes that younger generations are more than happy to sacrifice privacy to make meeting people easier. Dating sites have proven this. 10 years ago, if you were outed as using a dating site, you were labeled a loser. Now I'd bet a large proportion of folks are meeting online. A lot of "friction" has disappeared and people are doing it. I also often have noted how Twitter is making finding people in the real world easier via a simple service. It's so incredibly simple that there is hardly any barrier to use. Friction again is removed and you can see how successful Twitter has become. One caveat to all this is that a lot of these applications helping to facilitate the removal of friction are still only used by geeks. Further, only dating seems to have gone mainstream. MySpace and Facebook seem to be asleep at the wheel when it comes to truly taking advantage of the opportunity. And the carriers are trying to milk any and every opportunity before driving further innovation so don't bet on them. This means that it may take some time until your average user is standing in a bar, pinging the hot girl he sees both in front of him (physical features) and on his device (details about this person). I think the iPhone can play a role but it has to go beyond the iPhone. Again this will take time but seeing some of the success of Aki Aki and many other start-ups in this space gives me hope.
Babbling VC, Jun 2008Note: The final appearance of your post may be different, depending upon your blog’s style sheets.