Mobile location-based social networking sites will attract over 82 million subs by 2013.
ABI Research believe location applications such as friend finders, local search and geo-tagging will drive the growth and allow real-time experiences via fixed social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.It expects advertising-based models to prevail due to the perfect fit with the local search and content-driven social context. Another important trend will be location-enabled IM with applications such as Palringo Local and Nokia Chat enriching mobile communication with location context.
ABI also stressed the importance of new handset types such as mobile internet devices (MIDs) and in-car telematics.
Advertisement
