Mobile social not ready for prime time?

There's a reason why no mobile social-networking company has broken out yet. They haven't found themselves--on a map, that is.

Mobile networking, at least in the US, remains a limited extension of the social-media industry's biggest PC-based players: Lighter, messaging-focused versions of Facebook and MySpace.com, as well as instant-messaging software like Yahoo Messenger and AIM. Social-networking start-ups with a major or exclusive focus on mobile use, like Twitter, have failed to amass a following outside the alpha-geek crowd. For mobile social networking to really take off, it's going to have to move beyond providing new ways for people to bug their friends with text messages.

Recent announcements and developments in the mobile media world have indicated that location-based services are going to be the game-changer. These applications, using GPS technology or cell tower triangulation, are being talked about as the move that will push mobile social networking forward--and with good reason. Crafted correctly, a location-aware mobile service could not only tell you which of your friends are nearby, but also inform you of the nearest place where you could grab a slice of pizza (and whether your neighbors recommend it--as well as serve up advertisements that give "hyperlocal" a whole new meaning.

And with Yahoo's just-announced OneConnect launching in a few months--featuring "proximity alerts" when friends also using the service come within a certain distance of one another--it's clear that the biggest names on the Web see this as a promising market, too.

But don't hold your breath. Location awareness is going to make huge strides in how mobile devices are used, but it's not going to be a quick revolution. Services like Yahoo OneConnect, though brimming with hype, face both technological and psychological barriers that have kept their progress slow and will keep any company, start-up or conglomerate, from making an immediate splash in the space.

Right off the bat, there's the gadget factor: A whole lot of people are using cell phones that can't handle geotagging or "proximity alerts," and they aren't going to upgrade anytime soon. Those of us living in New York or the San Francisco Bay Area can easily forget that not everyone has a BlackBerry or an iPhone. Not everyone has a data plan, a built-in camera, or an unlimited text-message plan--let alone GPS capabilities. Plenty of people don't use their cell phones for anything other than boring old phone calls.

And even if they can handle GPS or the lower-tech triangulation, there's a good chance many cell phone customers don't even know about it. "Getting the customer to understand that (GPS) is on their phone has historically been the biggest hurdle," said telecommunications industry analyst Jeff Kagan. "All these cool technologies are available on the phone but nobody knows it. Customers don't know it."

Beyond handsets, cellular carriers play a crucial role in whether a location-based mobile service can take off. Loopt, a mobile social-networking site that relies on location awareness, is still only available on Sprint Nextel and its Boost Mobile subsidiary. Buddy Beacon, a similar service launched by mobile virtual network operator Helio, is available exclusively to the carrier's subscribers. To whittle it down even more, such applications are only available on compatible handsets.

There's a "lack of ability all around," said John Poisson, founder and CEO of mobile photo-sharing start-up Radar.net. "If you're talking about location-based services that are social in nature, you've completely broken the model because you can't do anything social with just a subset of an audience."

"It's like that old William Gibson cliche that everyone keeps recycling," said Michael Sharon, co-founder of geographic tagging site Socialight, which has been making small steps toward integrating location awareness into its mobile service. "It's that the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet."

A service like Yahoo OneConnect, backed by a well-connected dot-com giant rather than early-stage investor cash, could even the playing field with cross-carrier compatibility, but few details have been released about the product--and a beta test release is months away. It's a gamble as to which phones and carriers will actually work with it.

This story first appeared on CNET News.com.