Back in July I did some research on mobile social networks for the Monetise Web 2.0 & Social Networks Conference in London. The market froth was really exciting, but the products I was able to try on my Blackberry were really awful. I took a look at GyPSii, MyGamma, ovi, and facebook. The presentation below has YouTube videos embedded in the GyPSii slides and the MyGamma slides. Since July, I’ve tried some nice applications on my iPhone, but I still don’t know why the Blackberry versions were so awful. Is it that much harder to develop for Blackberry, or is it just the lack of an application store? I suspect the latter. But back to my story…
GyPSii: I couldn’t get this location-based app to do anything interesting or useful on my Blackberry, despite the native app designed and marketed from their site for my 8310. I poked around in the app and got a feel for what it might do, but the experience was a non-starter: it didn’t work.
MyGamma is a WAP app, for a site that’s the most popular social networking property in Singapore. I couldn’t get the account to work–and have video showing how lousy the UX was from my UK-centric view on it–so I looked at the public content, which was super dull. Watch the video for yourself.
Full presentation:Mobile Social Networks: the User Experience
YouTube links on GypSii and MyGamma pages
