With all the social networking sites out there, there must be a ton of duplicated code as each company tries to reinvent the way people add friends and interact on a social level. ClicMobile presented their new social network platform, AreYouHere, as an OEM platform for building social networks for virtually any site. Rather than trying to build their own community, ClicMobile chooses to focus on building the tools to make social networking possible, developing both a online component and a fully integrated solution for mobile phones.
The Web component feels a great deal like MySpace (at least in the only live environment currently at France’s YooTribe.com. YouTribe was created for M6 which is one of the larger telecom players in France. Below you can see the example profile I created through the French interface.
On the mobile side, ClicMobile seems to have worked hard at making it easy to interface with the platform through the Web. Depending on what information your friends or friends of friends share, you can even see where people you know are currently spending their evening through a location component that’s a bit like Dodgeball. Upload and download of data is supported for things like posting to the online component of the social network or downloading information from friends.
If I understood the CEO correctly, the platform should be compatible across multiple implementations, so if you sign up for a social network with one Web site and later join another Web site built on the AreYouHere platform, you won’t need to create a whole new profile for the second service. If that is the case, that’s definitely a step in the right direction. One of my biggest frustrations with social networking in general is the need to create a new profile with identical information every time a new site pops up. With only one site implemented at the moment, it will be awhile before we see whether the integration works in practice.
ClicMobile presented at DEMO China in hopes of gaining interest from China-based VC’s in an effort to bring the platform to the Chinese market. The rollout plan is to launch in markets with high penetration of GSM phones, making China among the biggest potential markets. With nothing like a Dodgeball as competition in China as of yet, ClicMobile may have a very good opportunity to connect a community that relies on SMS communication as a highly popular method for keeping in touch.