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Great post on TechCrunch today talking about the future of social networking (I Saw The Future Of Social Networking The Other Day)

Mike Arrington talks about a company that he has seen that could be diving into waters that Facebook and MySpace have yet to fully embrace, Mobile Social Networking. Yes, there are mobile version of both of these sites, but neither harness the power of your mobile phone.

The mobile phone is an amazing device that continues to get crazy cooler as the months go by. Not once have I ever regretted waiting in line and dropping cash on my iphone. There are few things these days that I at least don’t double guess myself from purchasing later (ahem, Netflix… at times). Back to my point… mobile phones are no longer your phone, they are your microcomputer. You can do a run a ton of apps on your smartphone that eliminate having to use your laptop. So this is quickly becoming a replacement in someways, and in others an augmentation to people’s digital experience (web, video, photos email).

If you have this microcomputer everywhere, why not have your web experience be in relation to where you are at. You see more and more mobile phones tying in GPS (Boost does this, iPhones Google Maps has a triangulation feature). Having contextual information of the people that you are having online relationships while you are interacting physically. Arrington’s thoughts:

Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting - quick LinkedIn-type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.

So picture being in arena at a Trail Blazers game and you fire up your iPhone. You are able to do a multitude of things on your phone, watch instant replays from different angles than what was on the big screen, get coupons for the merch store, and firing up your social network to see who in the arena is there that night. A map comes up  and shows all your friends’ thumbnails and where they’re sitting in relation to you…  so you can say “hey”! You could also see in general others at the game that you might not have met yet, or the guy who sits next to you that you’ve become friends with is on iamatrailblazersfan.com, but you never knew.

The game operations people can see use this to create a better experience based on the psychographics of the people in the arena that night. A snapshot of tonight’s crowd might say that 85% of the people sitting there that night are fans of Jay-Z, so they’ll play more Jay-Z that night. All of this could be possible.

It sounds like Arrington saw a start-up that is harnessing the iPhone SDK to make this happen. I’m really excited to see what happens. I really think this could be an awesome addition to existing social networks for Facebook, LinkedIN, MySpace, Flickr and also niche sites like our iamatrailblazersfan.com or MyColts.net.

Having something like this only available for one phone is a problem. It would need to be cross carrier/cross model. Alas, that is a problem with our system in the states, standardization is lousy on mobile phones. That’s for another post.