Moot – WiFi-based mobile social networking

moot.no is a brand new mobile social service for Windows Mobile 6.0 mobiles and XP/Vista PCs. You can share content (text, video, pictres) with the network closest to you. Launching out of Oslo, Norway, it has financial backing from TeleVenture and has a five person team.

Essentially what they do is connect people within the same wifi-network. Unlike Plazes, which is more about geotagging your location, people entering the same WiFi zone are displayed on your screen. However, Moot says they are building geotagging into their strategy.

Why only Windows mobile? And Why not the iPhone? Co-founder AndrĂ© Mlonyeni of Ground Conrol Labs tells me that “The reason for only supporting windows mobile is partly due to technological issues and partly due to resources. Supporting a variety of mobile platforms would demand a lot of resources just in porting the application. Also the typical mobile platform is not yet powerful enough to run our application the way we want.” However, they have plans for an iPhone version.

I should hope so.

Most Windows smartphone users are not mobile social networkers. They are businessmen who probably wouldn’t share a conversation, let alone a mobile video over an ad-hoc WiFi-based social network. That said, it will be interesting to see if Moot gets any traction, perhaps amongst Geeks who want to run a quick social network over WiFi at a conference.