Social Media Access Points

There are 3 primary modes of access for digital content, namely, PCs, mobile devices, and TV. Using IP all three can be enabled, however some basic advantages and limitation of these form factors have to be considered before mapping the content for these access points.

A successful social media platform should have enable content distribution to these access points. In addition, the access points should be well understood to build the right mapping between access points such that the creation and distribution of conent by both the media and user community should be simple, easy, and intutive for these form factors.

More on these points as we learn from our practical experience in implementing these features in indiainteracts.com. We just opened up our mobile offering 2 days ago and already excited about this as I just heard that IM in mobile is going to be a reality in India soon as MTNL has just today done a soft launch of it and would do a full scale roll out in the coming months. What excites me is that IM would eventually replace SMS and unlike SMS, IM needs a GPRS connetion. GPRS adoption is quite low in India (~10%) and IM is going to trigger its growth which is step closer to people getting used to accessing the web through their mobile devices. Today, I now and then see my Driver doing a SMS to his friends, hopefully, soon, I expect them to check the latest movie trailer from his phone. This is when sites like indiainteracts.com would reap its full potential and thats when traditional media companies would scramble to get a IP based delivery mechanism for their content.

The key dampner on my hopes would be cost. As voice based revenues spiral south, and almost irrelevant and growth rates eventually tappering off, most operators would look towards VAS to improve their ARPUs. GPRS would be treated as a VAS and hence would have a premium attached to it. Either this has to come down, or your offering would motivate the customer to pay this premium, not to you, but to the telecom operator for the GPRS connection. I still have my hopes pinned on IM to drive the GPRS growth rates.