More than Friendfeed for your phone: Jibe and Xumii launch mobile social aggregator services

Jibe and Xumii are two mobile service that let you access “feeds,” or streams of activity, from other social networks and services, that are new versions of their services this week. The concept of both services is promising, given that a typical use case for a mobile application is a person with a few minutes to spare and a phone in their hand.

On each application, you see incoming messages and notes from other social networks and give you a way to note a status change or new IM in any of your social networks. This is somewhat reminiscent of Friendfeed, a web service that lets you track what your friends are up to on other sites.

In addition to sharing media with any friend, Jibe offers an easy way to ‘express the moment’ without having to type a message on your phone, a feature it calls a “Shout.” Shouts are animated voice expressions, similar to a “poke,” making it easy for users to express themselves and grab the attention of their friends.

Both let you sync with social networks that you’re a part of and message back and forth with your friends on them. See Jibe screenshot:

Both services offer a mobile application, a web application, and ways to text messages to to the service, even if you don’t have access to either application. If you send messages to non-members, they then receive an email or SMS that includes a link to the message. This person clicks on the link and is able to view what has been shared with him. This is especially valuable for mobile devices — most users tend to not download mobile applications.

Stepping back, one may wonder about the result of this continuous stream of updates from friends and acquaintances. Is this just too much information to deal with? As with Friendfeed, there’s both an upside and a downside. On the up, it lets you track lots of core activities of your closest friends. On the downside, it requires significant investment, and dealing with even more noise than each social network or site already has.

However, a feature of Xumii called “groups” made me believe that it may work well as filter and be very useful at the same time. “Groups” can be collections of any people, be it family, friends or people one just has met. “Groups” enables me to send one message to all of them. At the same time it enables me to view any messages coming from this select group. The “group” feature may sound trivial, but it is actually great value if you imagine, for example, how hard it is to organize groups on an evening out. Imagine yourself messaging 10 friends to all meet for dinner at your favorite restaurant, then being able to discuss the plan as a group, on Xumii.

Xumii also has a public “wall,” a page of the site that lets you and your friends leave comments for each other in one central place.

The screenshots below hopefully illustrate the ease of the flow for a user when they want to add various data into chat. With both services, most of the main features take only 2-3 steps. This ease-of-use sets many mobile-only networks apart from their online competition.

Early indicators suggest that the “feeds” will enjoy success with users. Xumii has participated in an independent focus group run by Nokia in Singapore and won in all categories, as I’ve previously written. Xumii already is in private beta and launches its public beta this Friday.

Jibe launched its private beta today. For private beta both companies enable Facebook feeds plus own feeds. Jibe is planning to add Bebo and MySpace in the next coming weeks. Jibe has arranged special private beta invitations for VentureBeat, which you can get here.

Eric Eldon contributed to this article.

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To kick things off, I love this post from Dave McClure, outlining the problem with Facebook and their struggle to generate significant revenue from social networks. Speaking of not generating significant revenue, ya know that $ billion Yahoo paid for GeoCities, did they ever figure out how to monetize it? Hasn’t it been over 10 years and I don’t count hosting revenue as monetizing it. Clearly social networks need to be more open and integrate into existing monetization paradigms to financially scale.

What is OpenSocial: a common set of API’s for building social applications across multiple sites with three specific sets of APIs that tap into 1) member profiles, 2) the social graph, and 3) member activities. Examples of who is using it: Yahoo, Myspace, LinkedIN, Bebo, Friendster, hi5, Ning, Orkut, Plaxo, Viadeo, Oracle, Salesforce.com and others.

From Charlene Li (see link below) “Social apps will go beyond social networks. Note that Oracle and Salesforce.com are also partners. They have a strong interest in “socializing” their applications — applications like FaceForce that pull profile data into Salesforce.com. This opens up a whole other space for OpenSocial, namely any Saas or online site that would benefit from social information. Examples would include recruitment sites like Monster.com or CareerBuilder and dating sites like Match.com.

From Marc Andreeseen’s post (see link below): Are people really going to maintain multiple sets of front-end pages for their web sites for Facebook, Open Social, etc.? I think so, yes. I think any web site going forward that wants maximum distribution across the largest number of users will have a single back-end, and then multiple sets of front-end pages:

• One set of standard HTML and Javascript pages for consumption by normal web browser.
• Another set of HTML and Javascript pages that use the Open Social API’s Javascript calls for consumption with Open Social containers/social networks.
• A third set of pages in FBML (Facebook Markup Language) that use Facebook’s proprietary APIs for consumption within Facebook as a Facebook app.
• Perhaps a fourth set of pages adapted for the Apple iPhone and/or other mobile devices.

Marc condinued: Look at it this way: most users on the Internet (1.3+ billion, with 100 million joining every year) are not yet using any social networking service. The more compelling social networking becomes, the more users who will discover and start using social networking, and the bigger the pie gets for everyone, including Facebook.

Anil Dash at 6Apart had this to say:

• At Six Apart, we think the idea of using whatever applications you want, on whatever networks you want, is really powerful, and really cool.
• There isn’t going to be One Big Winner, either in social networking or in social applications — people will be using lots of networks and apps.
• All of us have to have open standards for these technologies in order to reach the audiences that current social networks aren’t serving well. This includes international audiences, business users, and other diverse communities.
• It’s important that all users have control over which applications and networks we use, and can move freely between them with our data and connections, in a system that honors privacy.
• As a platform, OpenSocial combines the best lessons from the popularity of widgets, the social capabilities of networks like Facebook, and the application power of successful platforms like Salesforce.com’s
• The important story about OpenSocial is what it enables for people, not the politics between big companies.

While I was digging around, I found these posts really interesting:

• Google’s official site of OpenSocial
• Explaining Open Social to Executives
• Marc Andreessen’s take on Open Social
• Marc Andreessen’s take on Friend Connect, OpenSocial & Ning
• Marc’s screen cast
• Six Apart’s take on Open Social
• Charlene Li’s take on Open Social
• Dave McClure’s take on Open Social
• Seven Buzz Monitoring Sites to Watch
• Phanfare’s take on OpenSocial
• Phanfare’s take on Google App engine vs Amazon’s Web Service