Vodafone "does a Myspace"

Vodafone will launch a social networking site viewable on mobile phones due for release by mid-October.

Quoting the article:
Netsafe director Martin Cocker doesn't see a mobile social networking site as fundamentally more dangerous than ones on the Web. But he is concerned the service will in future allow people to locate each other, as some US services do now.
"That becomes quite a risk because people are more likely to make face-to-face contact," he says.

This is quite an issue. Anonymity is a wonderful thing. And would someone please think of the childen..

So really, its just Myspace but alot more personal. Will that make connections and networking easier to build? If it is a success, what happens to Telecom? They were all set for a similiar product but pulled out at the last minute.

Some other ideas:

Question 1: If Myspace flops in a couple of years time, will Vodafone have the same fate with this new intiative?

Question 2: How much influence do you think Myspace's success as a popular social network had on this development?

Question 3: Is this further continuation of the increasingly feature-driven course of communication technologies, mobile phones and the Ipod for example?

Question 4: New Zealand wants to follow and keep up with international trends. The article says social networking sites are very popular in Korea and have increasing profiles in the United States and Australia. So I ask: does New Zealand have the market size to have a social network?

Personally I wouldn't necessarily join because of this added benefit (I'm already with Vodafone anyway). I think Vodafones' preliminary market are the corporates, and gradually will branch out to everyone else. Telecom is now behind the 8-ball re: social networking. Short-term, no-one bats an eye-lid, however this development has surely implications for the way we communicate in the future. Will New Zealand become one massive network where everyone is everyone else's "friend"?