Tell me your thoughts below!

I’m big on the idea of helping people and networking at a hyper local level. I also believe that your network is most effective if it also reaches far and wide – across borders of city, state, country and nation.

Think about it for a minute. If your network is made up of only your existing friends and family and a few existing coworkers, you have built a walled garden. What’s inside my be your own lovely garden, with prize-worthy flowers that are well tended, but any bad weather or difficult event can shake it up.

What happens if you move for an illness or a job? Have you built a network that will follow you? If your company is ready to expand, will you have the support outside of your existing world view to do so? What if the perfect job is a tweet or status update away and you miss it because your eyes aren’t open?

People often wall themselves off out of fear. Fear of change, fear of failure, fear of harm… there are a hundred different kinds of fear. Don’t let it rule you or your company. Add a gate to your garden and see who comes in. You’ll be surprised how it grows your network and where it takes you in life.

I’m a Blackberry user.  You might even say that I am a Crackberry addict.  I won’t say it, because that means I have admitted that I have a problem, and experts tell me such admittance must preclude a recovery of some sort.   But for better or worse, you might say my life revolves around the shiny little Blackberry Curve Sunset that never escapes my person.

I have the Facebook application for Blackberry.  I can update my status, post photographs, and send messages to friends.  You’d think that I’d also be able to receive notifications of messages, comments and wall posts made by my friends to me.  In theory, that should work…but in execution, it doesn’t.  I don’t know whether T-Mobile, RIM or Facebook is to blame, but I know this: they probably aren’t suffering like I am.  After all, nobody likes a tease, and having a Facebook icon situated fashionably on my menu is really only torturous when it never talks to me.

Twitter is also a favorite social tool of mine, and one of the few Twitter clients developed for Blackberry is Twitterberry. I also installed that client, and within a few hours, uninstalled it along with Facebook.  Blackberrys are handy in that their indicator lights flash red when a new update, message or call has been received.  Unfortunately, Twitterberry won’t alert you to updates.  In fact, not only won’t it blink red for updates, it caused my Blackberry to flash red when I had no messages.  I found myself checking my Blackberry every 15 seconds in hopes that I was not being deceived by the flashy red light, which was both time-consuming and irritating.

My much-belabored point is this: the entire reason social media and networks were modified for mobile devices was so users could enjoy the convenience of accessing their content abroad.  If you remove the convenience factor and insert frustration, well…you certainly haven’t moved ahead, have you?  I consider my social networks to be a source of enjoyment; I don’t need more complication or frustration, thank you very much.

Of course, there really isn’t any one entity to point a finger at; data networks still aren’t really where they should be for proper enjoyment of mobile social content, nor are handsets (I’m sorry Apple, Google, et al, but sometimes the truth stings).

A large problem is that carriers don’t feel the need to vastly improve their networks so that they can handle proper mobile social content because, aside from monthly data plans, there isn’t a penny in it for the networks.  Believe me, providers are itching for ways to hook users into paying for mobile social platforms, but it hasn’t quite caught on yet.  Unfortunately, the free social platforms can’t move forward in design until carriers start providing data networks and handsets capable of seamlessly integrating those platforms that don’t pay dividends.  The closest thing might be Apple’s iPhone on the AT&T network, and I certainly don’t think it is correct to say they’ve nailed it.

For now, there isn’t much to do besides wait.  That, and make it very clear to providers by way of social networks, platforms and blogs that robbing people blind for mediocre services and devices won’t stand.  Say what you like, but I’m not willing to pay exorbitant prices for lackluster data service when I can’t access those things that make having the internet in my pocket worth my time or money.

You see, along with the many various hobbies I entertain, I’m a self-proclaimed gadget geek.  Full blown.  I read somewhere that my Myers-Briggs personality analysis explains my need to have a new shiny gadget in my pocket at frequent intervals; thank you, whoever managed to connect psychology to my gadget addiction.  I now effectively have a doctor’s note to wave around at loved ones who wonder why I can’t stick with a cell phone for more than a year (at most) at a time.  

With that said, I’ve been somewhat disenchanted with mobile web browsing until just recently.  The iPhone was the very first device that actually made me want to use the internet on the go.  I don’t have an iPhone, though.  All the folks who browse the internet on Palms, Blackberrys, HTC devices or any other smart phones probably can relate when I say that mobile browsing can be a bear.

That isn’t necessarily the fault of the handset or operating system manufacturers.  The biggest problem is that there really aren’t really any rules or established guidelines for websites to follow when it comes to designing mobile-friendly pages.  Text can appear all jumbled up, you have to scroll every which way like you’re playing a game of Snake to navigate —  no rules usually translates as anarchy.  

I said a quiet prayer of gratitude yesterday when I read that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) finally laid out its first set of guidelines for creating mobile websites.  Anthony Ha of Venture Beat writes, “The consortium, commonly known as the W3C, is the primary international body that develops standards for the web, and now it’s turning its attention to the mobile world. The idea is to have a set of guidelines that developers can follow so that their sites can be viewed without difficulty on any device.”  If that doesn’t excite the pocket warriors amongst you, I don’t know what will!

With standardization of rules that demand mobile websites be accessible by any web-friendly mobile phone, more consumers will get on board with mobile browsing.  As more consumers become connected on the go, there will finally be the boom of users necessary for mobile social networking to really take off.  The scope and potential is huge!  With browsers being packed into every purse and pocket, we’ll see a huge boost in dependence on mobile social communities, and you can bet your britches it will change the way we think about mobile social networks and the devices we choose.

If, at this point, you still haven’t quite grasped how exciting this is (at least for me in my gadget-driven geek frenzy), I suppose you could imagine me doing an Irish jig in my office.  That’s not something I necessarily recommend.