More often than not, lately, the big phone providers, are focusing on the latest online trend, Social Media. Sites like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, brought everyone an online portal, on which to share their thoughts, feelings,absurdities and emotions. The popularity of these services, and the myriad of others that seem to appear on a daily basis, Is driving device manufacturers to include native applications to access these services.

Nokia are the latest on this bandwagon

The fact that phone makers are picking up on the whole self promotion, social media wave is not surprising. I wonder though, is this something that all mobile phone users want or need.

Admittedly I’m a twitter user, and I find it a useful tool, occasionally. I follow a whole heap of web sites that provide pertinent Windows Mobile information, that I might use, some what like a RSS reading application. Sometimes though I wonder, shouldn’t use of these services be a personal choice, and not an included service on a mobile phone, that you inadvertently use without prior knowledge of what the service is, or does, or leaves you open to?

Creating a profile on any social media network, leaves you open to as many whack jobs, self promoters, sales people and genuine people as you can handle. Filtering that combination of input, is well above the average level of work, and time that most people have in a day online. A lot of people get sucked into affiliate services that let them automate their Twitter accounts, and get lot’s of followers, as a marketing tool. Lot’s of people hook up with the same add ons and get spammed, and get no value from their social networking accounts.

So seeing this press release today from Nokia, this post is my reaction, and action.

What I wonder is

• do these apps, and their inclusion value add to the device?
• does the inclusion of these native apps, value add to the social media site?
• Should people not have the choice to install these apps themselves?
• Should device manufacturers assume that these are apps that people want?

I’d like to see your opinions and views here, but I’ll state mine, to start you off.

I can get a multitude of free third party apps to access all of these services, I would like to control what software I have included on any new phone I get, there is only one third party social media app I’m interested in, and I want a phone with as little service provider customisation as I can get!

Some how, the idea that a phone OS would work flawlessly, seems to be secondary to picking up on what’s hot online, is this actually what mobile device marketing has come to?

Seriously, crack me a comment below, if you think differently!