How Nokia will change MyFaves

Earlier this year T-Mobile International CEO Hamid Akhavan announced its community-oriented MyFaves service had 5.2 million users in the U.S., and after five weeks, the offering had already garnered a quarter million users in Europe. "We believe that we have found the pulse of community," Akhavan said at the time.

Now that the carrier has located that pulse, you can bet it has no plans to lose it.

Last week T-Mobile announced a deal with Nokia to collaborate on accelerating mobile Internet services and personal social communities on mobile devices. As part of the announcement, the companies announced their intent to further enhance T-Mobile's MyFaves service, which launched last fall in Europe.

MyFaves allows subscribers to call any five numbers it designates as a "Fave" for an unlimited number of minutes each month. Users can swap in new numbers each month. T-Mobile basically created a mini-social network of the five most important people around their subscriber, and this still-nebulous deal with Nokia signals an intent to enrich and deepen the community aspects of that mini-social network.

Within the small group of successful mobile social networks, or those poised for success, are two types of offerings: Mobilized versions of the big social networks (MySpace, Facebook) and exclusively mobile offerings that typically use location-based features as a differentiator (loopt, Whrrl). The mobile social networking start-ups must make use of location in order to compete with the established brands, which boast millions of users. If T-Mobile is serious about making MyFaves a useful community offering, it needs to work toward making location a part of the next evolution of the MyFaves.

Who better than Nokia to take on such a task? The company just recently acquired one of the biggest location-based services company in the world, Navteq, for a cool $8.1 billion. Of course, MyFaves allows subscribers to pick any number, which means any carrier. And carriers aren't really ready to start sharing their location-based information with each other and quite a few regulators don't want them too either. So if T-Mobile, Nokia and Navteq are serious about enriching mobile social communities, they are going to have to start by bringing the carriers together first. - Brian