[jacabado]

I had the idea to explore a similar concept, based on shared events instead of a friend list. The objective was avoiding the degradation I had seen on other social networks. Hi5 and Orkut were the experiences where I based this reasoning. This was 3-4 years ago, I still hadn't used facebook.

One of my ideas was to give users access to sponsored SMS's. They could send a SMS and would have to choose some sponsor to that SMS, in the bottom of the SMS it would be included a slogan of the sponsor (20-40 characters). This could also work as user acquisition by sponsoring the platform itself. <evil> The friends contact information could also be used somehow </user>

The strong points for this idea was that the profiles of users would have been richer to the advertisers allowing better targeting. Consumer brands are strongly tied to events, and I suppose this would facilitate getting advertisers. It would also enable to give brands opportunities to sponsor smaller events (long tail on the event advertising market).

Ads targeting is in a whole new level nowadays and I don't believe it would be a real competitive advantage, but maybe it could be sold as so. The success of this idea also depends a lot on how much people value free SMS's. Here in Portugal SMS's are free inside the same operator but I see younger people doing big gimmicks to get free SMS's to other operators. The effort people are willing to put to achieve that is crucial, I don't know how well that applies in other contexts.

Could we see something similar on Twitter? Instead of a sponsored SMS, a sponsored Tweet? If they give me the possibility of tweeting from my cell phone for free in exchange of a few characters and ads noise I would do it.