Jygy.com - Mobile Social Networking
A cool little detail they got going here, in the spirit of social media considering it’s a Web 2.0 conference, are “badge tags”. Badge tags are basically a set of small stickers that look like this. The thought behind them is to put a few on your badge and tag it (just like in the world of Web 2.0) so that people you meet on the Expo get more information about you and chances of striking up a conversation about something relevant increases. Anyhow, a pretty clever little something that caught my attention.
I walked around the hall where the Expo was held and talked to some exhibiters. One amongst many were the guys behind Jygy. Jygy is, according to these guys anyway, the next step in mobile social networking. From what I could grasp, it’s a social network for mobile devices with functionality like private chat rooms, mobile polls and mass messaging. They have a mobile device optimized website but a majority of the services are initiated through SMS-messages.
They have been online for about a month now and are obviously still in Beta. I asked him how many users they have so far but I got the usual “we haven’t looked at those numbers yet”-response. I’m not sure whether or not a service like this will take off since all the major social networks like Facebook already have sustained value with their number of users and are also working towards optimizing their respective service for mobile devices. Furthermore, as I learned today, experts predict that in the future there won’t be anything called “mobile web”, there will be “one web” which in turn is thematically consistent across all devices.
Just before I got out of there I asked if the guy could sign-me up and he said sure. The only problem was that they only have support for US carriers. Slight lack of global approach there I must say..
In the next post I will talk about the first talk I went to, Mobile Ajax and the Future of the Web with Vodafones senior technology strategist.
And lastly, if you want to see some of the pictures I took today you can subscribe to my San Francisco dedicated Flickr Feed. Just click it and bookmark it if you’re on a Mac and don’t use an RSS Reader.