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mobile avatar communities

Last summer, I remember having a conversation with a UChicago alum about having a mobile community based on avatars as an upcoming trend. Now it is March 28th, and NextGreatThing basically echoes that sentiment. With the huge popularity of avatar-driven social networking sites such as Second Life and Cyworld, it has only been a waiting game until mobile handset technology enables us to view and care for our avatars on our mobile screens.

CBS has just created an avatar-based game for the show, "America's Next Top Model." In partnership with Cyworld, NBC is launching an avatar-based game called Fancy, who is a character on the popular soap drama, Passions.

Avatars do create a more entertaining way to communicate and interact with others in a virtual world. People's vanity does tend to get them to care more about their avatars. One could leave a MySpace or Facebook profile as is for a long time; however, people do tend to change the look of their avatars just as frequently as they change their clothes everyday. With companies moving to Second Life as a way to reach the young tech-savvy consumers, bringing such capabilities to mobile phones is a natural step in the development of social networking communities.

As much as I said I would never bring Facebook, Myspace, or Cyworld with me through mobile, I must admit (and some of my other friends as well) that I would probably check these sites if I had a phone with an internet package. This was the case when I was in Europe. I had 10 minutes of internet time with my pay-per-use phone plan. I used all of it on the first day, and went back to get more credit to view online later.

posted by Koh @ 1:06 PM