CTIA: VzW, AT&T Become Social Networking Aggregators

“Getting agg-ro” has recently taken on new meaning in the mobile space with applications that aggregate social networking, user-generated content and other Web 2.0 “personal media” buzzword-y content sites into a single handy-dandy portal. At CTIA WIRELESS I.T. & Entertainment 2008 in San Francisco this week the idea has kicked into high overdrive, notably with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless both launching their own social networking aggregation offerings.

It makes sense they smell an opportunity; with the sheer multiplicity of social networking sites out there, it’s hard to keep up with them all — especially if you do anything else, such as go to work, or socialize in real life. The problem is that Verizon and AT&T’s on-deck aggregation apps, called SocialLife and My Communities, respectively, only provide access to MySpace and LiveJournal information, and a host of niche social networking sites like AsianAve and MiGente. No sign of Twitter, Facebook or other hot sites. So it will remain to be seen if the launches can be competitive with some of the other third-party offerings.

And to that point, the carriers are a little late to the game; Yahoo! has been agg-y with it for months now with the third-party oneConnect, but is going back to the well with a new version for iPhone.

Meanwhile No. 1 handset manufacturer Nokia is using CTIA to showcase its continuing push into North America with services, including new functionality for its “Ovi” Web portal, launched nine months ago. Ovi means “the door” in Finnish and acts as a personal dashboard for PC and mobile phone-based Web content, including an online music and video store, MySpace and Facebook, Flickr photo sharing, GPS-enabled Nokia Maps with city guides, geo-tagging of photos, and the N-Gage gaming service.

A company called NewBay Software Ltd. is a carrier-focused pure-play player in the space, and at CTIA NewBay has launched version 2.0 of its LifeCache media upload client that enables subscribers to post and share user-generated content, such as photos and videos, with a single click. LifeCache also presents popular information from multiple online communities, including Facebook, Bebo, YouTube and MySpace, in a single feed.

Perhaps they should include blog information from xchange magazine as well; that could be the next differentiator.

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Yahoo! Announces oneConnect with Location Awareness

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