T-Mobile and Intercasting Corporation today announced that they have added social networking sites Bebo and Piczo to T-Mobile’s My Social Sites service.
As a mobile application, My Social Sites provides users with a single interface, which allows social networkers to manage their favorite sites directly from the sites.
This latest announcement enables UK users to stay in touch with the social networking sites via a click, and My Social Sites application also allows users to upload pictures from their mobile phone direct to the sites.
Bebo and Piczo will be added to the existing My Social Sites such as Xanga, LiveJournal, BlackPlanet and Vox and mobile community, Rabble. The technology behind My Social Sites is provided by Intercasting and its ANTHEM platform.
T-Mobile’s officials said that the ANTHEM platform provides social networking category management for T-Mobile through applications, messaging and embedded handset features.
Quoting the eMarketer May 2008 report, Pauline Lunn, head of Beyond Voice at T-Mobile said that more than 800 million people are predicted to use social networks via a mobile phone by 2012, and T-Mobile is tapping into this phenomenon.
“By adding Bebo and Piczo to the service we’ve added two of the industry’s most popular sites,” Lunn said.
Ziv Navoth, senior vice marketing of marketing and business development at Bebo, said that My Social Sites will help Bebo’s users to extend their Bebo experience by allowing them to converse with one another, share their passions, discover new forms of entertainment and express their identities regardless of where they are.
“With My Social Sites, Piczo members are able to express themselves through photos and stay connected with friends long after they’ve left the comfort of their computer. Our members asked for it – with partners like T-Mobile and Intercasting, we were able to deliver it,” said Jeremy Verba, CEO at Piczo.
Content creation, communication and managing costs are consistently a top must-have feature for mobile social networkers, noted Sean Kane, general manager of international at Intercasting Corporation.
Kane added that My Social Sites delivers on all three with a “powerful mobile experience.”
Anshu Shrivastava is a contributing editor for IoTevolutionworld. To read more of Anshu’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
