Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch has an interesting piece about about mobile social networking (”I Saw The Future Of Social Networking The Other Day“).

A few years from now we’ll use our mobile devices to help us remember details of people we know, but not well. And it will help us meet new people for dating, business and friendship. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings.

Social NetworkingArrington, who is very positive about the prospects of such an innovation, argues that not only is the opportunity wide-open for such a platform wide-open right now, but that it’s largely being ignored by the two people best-placed to dominate it: Facebook and MySpace.

Anyone who knows me will recall that I’ve long been suggesting that such a product is inevitable. To be honest, particularly given the success of the iPhone, I thought it would already be out by now.

One has to wonder why such an obviously popular item is yet to grace the marketplace.

Arrington adds:

Poking someone on Facebook is great, but “poking” them when you’re in the same bar as them can result in much more immediate social gratification.

And this may be the problem.

Privacy.

Sure, you can set up any device so that you’re invisible, or can only be ’seen’ by X, which will probably just include your friends, but given that this will inevitably have either Bluetooth or proximity limitations, how is that any different from seeing a face you know in a bar or on the street? Or sending somebody a text? Or knowing somebody is going to be out, anyway?

If the software functions on GPS, then this raises further privacy issues. How many people do you know who you really want to know exactly where you are, 24/7? Not even your mother, right? How many people on your Facebook or MySpace - you know, the ones you call ‘friends’ - actually know exactly where you live? I bet it’s a lot less than half. A lot.

One imagines that what sounds like a great idea on paper, might be some kind of personal hell in reality. Much like how video phone calls have never really taken off outside of the business world - one, you have to be always on, always looking your best (in case he phones), and two, what happens when a stranger calls? Which they always do.

On browser-based social networking applications like Facebook, one can afford to be fairly flippant with who can ’see’ you, because that’s as far as it goes: the browser. Sure, one or two freaks will use this basic information to try and dig further into your private life, but they’re thankfully fairly rare, and there’s only so much they can do with it (largely depending on how casual you are with your personal data.)

However, in a mobile application, something far more serious is at play: your physical well-being.

Picture this. The application is launched, and is initially very popular (which it will be). You experiment with various settings, and decide that you only want a select group of people to be able to ’see’ you during a certain period of the day. Maybe you can configure it for social hours only - say, 8pm to midnight, Friday and Saturday only.

That’s great. That appears to take all the risk out. But what about everybody else? What about their settings? What about the people they are with? It’s all well and good personally blocking somebody who you don’t want to know you’re out, but what if that person is with one of the friends you do? Then what? Tension. And probably hostility. Maybe pugilism. It’s bad enough know when somebody finds out you’ve blocked them on Facebook because they’ve seen you contribute in some way to a mutual friend’s page, or that same friend has casually mentioned, in passing (like they do) that you’re on their friend list. Throw in a bout of physical interaction with that, and it’s much, much worse. The fear of actual confrontation has a way of keeping us honest.

And this isn’t even touching on the real risk with a platform of this kind - the humble stalker.

In the virtual world, for most people, stalkers aren’t even an issue. For those relative few that are, it’s something that can be shut down fairly easily by using a mix of common sense and privacy settings. As above, even if they manage to get through, and assuming you aren’t a total idiot, there’s only so much they can do.

But in a real world, that break is far more significant. If you slip-up, the ramifications could be enormous. And what if you don’t slip up - what if you do everything right, but one of your other friends passes on information about your location at a given point in time, or some third-party lunatic comes up with a hack that gets around other users’ privacy settings? You know that will happen.

All of which leads to one thing: initial massive popularity, followed by a fairly swift, and dramatic, re-think.

In the past, Arrington has argued that an iPhone-only application is potentially the ideal way to start this product. As he says:

iPhone users are the perfect group to launch the network to. They’re passionate and elitist, and will like the idea of being in an iPhone-only club. Go to a party and see a picture and first name of everyone there who’s holding an iPhone - then meet them and add them as friends. Then, once mutual friendship is established, see those people wherever they are in the world, along with presence information telling you what they’re thinking, or up to.

He even mentions that such a product is already in development, and has a screen shot.

iPhone Social Networking

That’s fine. This would probably work, again at least initially, primarily for the reasons mentioned. A group of iPhone-rabid, like-minded geeks are probably fairly safe when it comes to the probable downsides I discussed above.

But niche groups don’t make a lot of money for software houses. For something like this to work, it needs support, both from the coders and the community. It needs to get popular, fast. It needs to go global.

And when that happens, when everybody is involved, that’s when all the dark places start to appear. The little cracks and corners and shadows where the bad people hide. I risk sounding a little dramatic here, and perhaps I am, but we’ve all seen evidence of it, either directly or from friends, in the virtual world, so why assume it would be any different in the real one?

Even today, at least a decade after the Internet really started to catch-on, many people are still very coy about the way they interact with it. Lots of folk - possibly even the adult majority - remain suspicious of things like eBay, or even using their credit card online. Some are paranoid about the risk of receiving a virus in their email. Others won’t even use things like Facebook, because they fear the consequences. Even if to those that do these people seem strange, naive even, they’re still a big part of the picture. (Furthermore, their privacy is at stake here, too, even if they choose to opt out, because of the ripple effect I mentioned above. People don’t trust people not to rip them off or hurt them in some way.)

How could the real-life downsides of a mobile social networking product not put those same fears in the very same people it was trying to market to? As well as those who, while fine with a browser-based tool, are far more coy when it comes to one in their pocket? Why wouldn’t it become a real issue?

It’s inevitable. Which means that, ultimately, the failure of the product is inevitable too. By definition for it to really succeed it needs to put the safety of the user at the very forefront. By doing this, it will have to limit its range (or have a very easily-configured facility to do so). As a result, most people, the vast, vast majority, will have a very small group of very select and carefully hand-picked friends and family on their device, and that’s it. And probably only for a few hours a week.

Because those that don’t - those who just let anybody through, at any time - are putting an enormous amount of themselves at risk. When all is said and done, everything will live and die on what privacy setting becomes ‘normal’ for any given user. Ask yourself: how much of your life are you willing to share with people you don’t really know?

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