How to Build Social Mobile Applications

As I work on my MobiChange application for the second round of Knight News Challenge 2009, my thoughts return to two recent posts on building social mobile applications.

Ken 'Kiwanja' Banks wrote a great post last week on the mistakes techies make in developing social mobile applications for the emerging world --

Progress in the social mobile field will come only when we think more about best practices in the thinking and design of mobile projects and applications, rather than obsessing over the end products themselves. By then most of the damage has usually already been done.

Ken gave some great advice, based on his own FrontlineSMS experience: understanding the need gap before entering development, learning from other tools/ players, prototyping early and cheap, partnering with grassroots non-profits, staying lean, being flexible, encouraging local customization, focusing on text and voice, starting small, working closely with early users, and building conversations and community over time. My own approach to MobiChange is similar and I'll try to follow most of Ken's advice in the months to come.

It reminded me of another great post in which Russel Southwood critiqued the social mobile space (via Katrin Verclas) and raised several important questions around usability, impact, scale and sustainability --

So if it’s such an obviously good idea, why can’t I name more successful, long-standing projects that have begun to change the fundamentals of communication or the lives of people?

The immediate and seemingly reasonable response is that many of these projects are in their early stages. There did not seem to be a single project I spoke to at the (MobileActive '08) conference that was not a pilot: in other words it will be funded for a year to three years and then may disappear. However, the early pioneers stretch back further and few have found their financial feet or scaled up in such a way that they have made a significant major impact. Indeed one might ask: with so many pilots around, when are we going to see some flying?

Russel argues that a social mobile project will work if it communicates more effectively with a group of people and/or it is more cost effective. I'll add to that and say that a social mobile project will work if it follows a commercial-social hybrid model, like the Prakelt Foundation in South Africa.

I have some thoughts on how to apply these learnings to MobiChange, but that's another post.