Vodafone Plans Social Connections

BusinessWeek has a story claiming that Vodafone plans a social networking service, but specific details are regrettably scarce, so it’s not really news — it would be more newsworthy if Vodafone came out and said they weren’t planning some sort of social networking service.
The one detail in the article is that Vodafone plans to offer access to online social networking services: “The British company is in talks with a number of social-networking sites, and expects deals to be completed during the first quarter of 2007.” If accurate, it means that Vodafone doesn’t see the benefit in launching a purely mobile effort, and also does see the benefit in providing access to as many services as possible, instead of only one. Which makes sense, since MySpace is huge in the US, but other countries are dominated by other networks.
“The time has come for us to offer social-networking services,” says Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin. He declined to identify which service Vodafone was talking to, or whether one or more partnerships were expected.” There’s also no mention as to whether the efforts will be a group-wide thing or confined to specific countries, or how access will be offered.
BusinessWeek mentions one of the social networks in talks with Vodafone as being MySpace — but MySpace is making a big push into the global mobile market and is probably talking to any operator that will listen.
I think the best thing Vodafone (or any operator) can do is link up with as many networks as possible. It would probably need to make the point of access customizable, so that people could choose to have MySpace, Bebo, Orkut or whatever but not have to see icons for all of them.0
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MySpace/Softbank JV Confirmed

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