Reliance Communications has launched a mobile VAS application called Socially, which gives access to to social networks including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn through a single client. What’s interesting about it is that when you receive a call, the callers recent status updates are shown. Socially is downloadable from RWorld and users can subscribe to the service at Rs. 10 for 30 days without having to pay any additional browsing charges. This is not the first instance of telecom operators giving unlimited access to the social networks: Tata Docomo had done that recently for its BuddyNet users at a price point of Rs. 10 for 30 days: no additional browsing charges apply.
Socially has been developed by Mumbai and Singapore based Antarix Networks, founded by former ITFinity exec Nagesh Rao. ITFinity was acquired by OnMobile in 2007. Socially is 3G ready, and ready to be extended to 3G networks in India. We expect 3G to be launched in India before the next millennium.
Features
An interesting feature non-social-networking feature of the app is that it allows you to get context when receiving a call from someone: information on you last spoke or SMSed the caller, as well as an aggregation of the persons statup updates from Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as RSS feeds. One has an newsfeed interface for the various social networks, and can set it to auto refresh every 30 minutes, as well as adding mobile desktop alerts (which I think are productivity killers). Two additional features: users can also learn about where an anonymous caller is calling from, and also use the app to block certain callers.
The 889kb application can also be downloaded from Nokia’s Ovi Store (here), GetJar (here), or directly from http://m.sociallyapp.com
How Much Info Do You Want To Disclose?
But would you like everyone to see your tweets when you’re calling them? Geodesic Chief Products Officer Atul Chitnis raised the issue of linking Twitter accounts with LinkedIn: I wouldn’t want all my personal updates to be available on a professional profile, or to every caller. The mobile phonebook is contains a mix of your professional and personal networks, so one should be careful how you approach this applications. Socially’s privacy settings need to be rather detailed and flexible, in our opinion.
Please note that while Antarix’s terms and conditions (when you install the application) mention that its privacy policy is disclosed at http://www.antarix.com/privacy , the link did not work for us.
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3 Comments until now.
the privacy policy link works.. and since the app only connects to the user's accounts on facebook or twitter it doesn't actually intrude in to once space. The info is anyways available when the user of the app logs in to his FB or TW account through other channels.
Will be interested to see how much of revenue will this social networking bubble generate to the mobile operators??? Its just a mee tooooo approach to jump on to the bandwagon with out clear approach on what you exactly want to achieve. Will there be any contextual advertisements driven by the app providers or the operator or any content download cross promotions???
Ha ha.. who is this guy who gets a call and sms from BillG every minute?