We were the first to drop the ball on Nokia Mosh a few weeks back and I didn’t pay too much attention to it because I figured it to be another social networking site. I picked up on it because they were poking fun at Apple and attempting to lure folks burned by the price cut to check it out. Well, I’ve spent a bit of time tinkering with the site and sat down with George Linardos, Director of Business Development and Marketing at Nokia who co-founded and currently oversees Marketing, Product and Biz Dev for Mosh. He’s a former Hollywood movie exec and producer who came from Macromedia as Director of Programming before joining the Finnish company. My views have changed over the last few weeks on Mosh and I think that if you spent a bit of time on it you’ll learn to like it and love it. You don’t need a Nokia device, either, but it helps because the mobile UI on Nokia handsets is a smidgen nicer than on other mobile phones.
It’s a no brainer that Web 3.0 or whatever you want to call it will eventually lead to more content being available and created from our mobile phones. We’ve already started in that direction, but probably haven’t realized that’s the next step in the evolution of the Internets. A mash between social sites and UGC available on your mobile phone whenever you want is what Mosh brings to the table. A core group of 24 developers and rogue Nokia employees built and released Mosh in 94 days, which is pretty impressive. It’s still in Beta and will continue to be so until the team feels that Mosh doesn’t need to be babied and constantly doctored. “But don’t worry”, says Linardos, “it won’t be a Gmail type Beta.” Heh. Nice one, George.
So how does Mosh work? That was the first thing I asked. When you visit the site you can send an SMS to your handset that contains the link for a mobile optimized Mosh. Like I said before, it doesn’t look bad on non-Nokia devices, but it certainly helps the experience when you do have one. Mosh will eventually sniff out your device via SMS exchange and optimize your search for content that is specific to your device. The content available on Mosh ranges from audio clips you record at concerts to the complete works of Shakespeare and everything in between. Did you just catch your friend’s significant other smooching with someone else? Snap a picture and upload that sucker to Mosh. Want to play Dragon Ball? Download it now and get going! Don’t think you can upload illegal music tracks or videos, either, because Audible Magic will bust your ass. The same digital fingerprinting goes for games. With any user generated content site you’re going to get your fair share of softcore p0rn, but there are helpful and useful members like Dr. Dan. He tells you what to do if you’re having a heart attack.
So you’ve got all these favorite pictures, videos, games, apps, tunes and documents, but how do you access them quickly and easily from your device? You collect them, of course. Or subscribe to members who develop the best of Mosh. Your “My Dashboard” keeps track of your ranking among the 35k+ users and gives you a visual of where you stand as a creator, collector or sharer. An upcoming ranking system will award badges much like the awards you get in video games when you achieve some goal like 100k downloads or something.
With close to four million downloads of the Mosh client and 100k+ content downloads it’s not hard to see how big Mosh has already become since its August 9th launch. It’s available in over 100 countries with India being the top dawg at 28 percent. About 70 percent of devices registered on Mosh are Nokia, which make sense since they are the world’s largest manufacturer. The US hasn’t quite caught on, but with a little bit of time I’m sure we can move up from the #7 spot in the world to the top. Because we have to be on top, right?
If you need help or want to comment about Mosh then be sure to stop by and say hi to Russell. He’s the resident lochness monster who interacts with Mosh users. He was coined Russell by one of the rogue Nokia folk who watched Russell Crowe in Master and Commander the night before their powwow. When Russell tells you to do something, you better do it.
It’s a bit blurry. Sorry.