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Five shiny new mobile social networks

These five mobile social networks are all vying to be the next hot thing. See how they stack up.

Jessica Dolcourt Senior Director, Commerce & Content Operations
Jessica Dolcourt is a passionate content strategist and veteran leader of CNET coverage. As Senior Director of Commerce & Content Operations, she leads a number of teams, including Commerce, How-To and Performance Optimization. Her CNET career began in 2006, testing desktop and mobile software for Download.com and CNET, including the first iPhone and Android apps and operating systems. She continued to review, report on and write a wide range of commentary and analysis on all things phones, with an emphasis on iPhone and Samsung. Jessica was one of the first people in the world to test, review and report on foldable phones and 5G wireless speeds. Jessica began leading CNET's How-To section for tips and FAQs in 2019, guiding coverage of topics ranging from personal finance to phones and home. She holds an MA with Distinction from the University of Warwick (UK).
Expertise Content strategy, team leadership, audience engagement, iPhone, Samsung, Android, iOS, tips and FAQs.
Jessica Dolcourt
2 min read

It's the year of social networks wrought with the mobile experience in mind. I spoke to five companies peddling their handheld experience as The Next Big Thing; here's how they stack up.

bluepulse logo

Bluepulse is the most advanced of the bunch, with a messaging service core and a profile, activity feed, and friend-of-a-friend discovery as other central activities. Messaging is easy. The single in-box shows status updates, all message types, and friend requests, and filters within this section highlight new messages and allow search.

You can post photos and 3G videos, but click-to-call is still under development. I dig the automatic spell check and basic grammar correction, but wish the messaging had a drop-down menu or predictive text to quickly choose from among friends. Unlike others, Bluepulse is purely mobile, operating on a slim and simple WAP site that never looks right from the desktop.

Based out of the U.K., Trutap has much more momentum abroad--in the U.S. the closed beta only works on AT&T and limits all-in-one IM to MSN, Yahoo, AIM, and ICQ services. Trutap is more a mobile facilitator than pure mobile social network in that photos and posts push to partner sites--Blogger, LiveJournal, Flickr, and so on. Trutap friends can also chat in-network.

utterz cow

Another service pushing mobile-generated content to the Web is Utterz, which puns mercilessly on its name. (The tagline is "Get Herd." Groan.) Images, video, and text are all included in the round-up, as are voice "utterz" you record by dialing a clearinghouse. Utterz can autopost to an impressive haul of services, including TypePad, WordPress, Twitter, and Facebook, along with some of the more usual suspects.

Matching voice Utterz with text and photos is another stand-out feature. Utterz nets disparate media sent within a 10-minute window and groups them together in a single post. Media can be surgically removed with some online account management, but tough luck if you try to do it from your device.

Whrrl logo

Whrrl and Rummble (review) are similar location-based social networks with dual use on the Web and phone (a WAP site for Rummble and an app for Whrrl.) Geotagging is the name of the game, with friends broadcasting their whereabouts and venue ratings within their network. Both have the usual text and photo uploading, profile management, and friend discovery features, but you can also connect friends in real life based on location-based alerts.