After my overview of ixenland I have decided to take a look at all of the large and growing actors in this space. Over the next couple of reviews I will look at all of the best known ones. Today we will start with a fairly recent actor in this space but who has acquired an impressive number of users :

MocoSpace is Boston-based startup launced in April 2007 that provides social networking for mobile phone users. Network features include photo, video, chat, and microblogging in a very Twitter like way.

They raised $3 million in first round of financing in January 2007. Investors included General Catalyst, Pilot Group and Michael Deering. The company has 15 employees (half in Boston, half in Israel).

As of late August 2007, the company claims to have almost 1 million registered users (with 6,000 more per day) and 500 million monthly page views !

Their mobile social network is simple to use and fast.. which is always a plus on a mobile. But lets start at the beginning. When you come to their home you get this on a Nokia and on an iPhone which looks quite a bit like the menu of a phone in fact :

Signing up is easy and fast. It is done in two quick pages :

Signing up gives you a profile (your sign in name is your public name too) a mobile site that you can personalize by making a personal message, changing photos and adding backgrounds or changing font colors.. Ã la MySpace. To say that this is simple to do is an understatement. You get an URL immediately.. mine is mocospace.com/u/evademel which is your site and you can send to friends (the only issue here I would say is it is a bit hard to type slashes /// on a mobile.. but well lets not split hairs).

After that there are the other classic features of a social network.. view profiles with some limited search features or a near me feature, send a message, make friends (there is a cool feature which is find me a friend which apparently randomly finds a person of the opposite sex..) and create a list of friends. When on a persons profile you can vote for that person as well. You then have the video section, the photo section, etc.. The chat and forums work very well and are quite busy so for new users this is great.

Basically there is a hodge-podge of social site tools and services.. you have a feeling you are on a MySpaceYouTubeFacebook on the mobile. This isn’t a bad thing… it just doesn’t seem to have 1) anything new, different or innovative and 2) it doesn’t take advantage of the mobility and geo-localisation possibilities of a mobile. Also the service as I said seems to hesitate as to what it is all about. Is it dating, is it a friends network or is it a video/phot sharing service ?

So my verdict is well guys you are doing a good job.. but you have to find that spark of innovation to make this a truly unique sticky service that will give you the staying power to outlast the big web guys that will figure out the mobile internet soon enough.

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