Bringing Social Feeds to Your Eager Pockets

Its official: I am addicted to following Twitter .  The habit is nearly as obsessive if not moreso than compulsively jumping to my inbox anytime Mail.app for Mac shows I have a new email.  I even have SMS notifications enabled for a select group of Twitter friends on my cell phone.  Once the voyeuristic beast is awakened and my social juices start flowing, it is all too easy to greedily devour as much mobile-social functionality as I can get my hands on. 

Obviously mobile integration of popular social tools is nothing new.  Nearly every cell phone comes equipped with some sort of instant-messaging program (AOL 's being most popular) these days. The next logical step in increasing social functionality was to integrate the most popular social platforms like Facebook and MySpace , which has proven largely successful for both platforms.  Most users can receive social updates through SMS messaging, and though it can be pestersome at times, the functionality is usually a welcome feature for socialholics.  

Since people have begun adopting the more complex social platforms, developers aren't the only ones investigating ways to spread socialholism to your cell.  Now cellular providers are taking interest in some of the more promising platforms being designed for mobile phones.  Xumii is a new mobile social platform currently in closed beta testing that is catching the attention of mobile providers looking for a quality social platform to directly include in handsets.

Xumii works much like the controversial social feed aggregator FriendFeed , in that Xumii accumulates users' account information from social sites including Facebook, AOL Instant Messenger, Windows Live, Google,  Yahoo and Flickr, and then displays a sort of running feed of all your social activities directly on your handset.  Beyond the aggregating functionality, users can then update their different accounts, share various media with other users, join "Groups" with friends (see "Rooms" on FriendFeed), and post and receive message posts to users' walls.  

Xumii and other platforms don't pop out of thin air into your phone, though.  Nothing has been solidified yet, but some believe providers who do move to integrate mobile social platforms like Xumii will either charge users a monthly fee (on top of standard data plans), or move to incorporate advertising, the profits from which would be shared between the providers and the developing companies.

Though I'm not a huge fan of FriendFeed (many apologies, Scoble), the various platforms that can be aggregated therein are much more appealing than Yahoo, Windows Live, and AIM, at least for me.   In fact, it wouldn't be a terrible idea for FriendFeed to develop a mobile platform; in that way FriendFeed could experience high adoption rates simply due to the platform being built into handsets.  Of course, the key to such a platform's success would be that it is built into cell phones; anyone with a browser can visit a social site to check up on things, but true integration is the next step towards keeping junkies perpetually sedated with their social media away from home.