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[edit] Social networks

Regarding the four main Open Source mobile platforms, it is also interesting to compare the existing clients for the top social networks. It is important to note that it's only considered the platform itself and not the different implementations. For example, LiMo doesn't have any client for social networks by default, but Vodafone's LiMo customization deployed in the Samsung Vodafone 360 does.

Also, other applications which can be found on their respective publishing channels are considered here. It's not the case of non-published apps. It is possible that some apps are not supported by some different versions of the same OS, like 1.5, 1.6 versions of Android or the Symbian S60`s 3td edition or 5d edition.

[edit] Distributed social networks

During last years, when the Internet community has been asking more often for open technologies, a new concept of social networks has been developed: Distributed social networks.

There are two different ideas behind them:

• Aggregated social networks: The majority of the users have several contacts in different social networks, like professional contacts on Linked In, and friends on Facebook. Interoperability between the different social networks is the idea of the aggregated social networks. If many social networks providers bring developers standard web services, with standard authentication system (like OAuth or OpenID) and robust privacy control, developers will be able to have a single account for many social networks, which would work together. There are currently few projects which make this and also some standard protocols and ideas, but these are still too far yet. The main problem for this is because social networks are direct competitors one each other, and it is too difficult that they collaborate between them. An aggregated social network example is the OpenSocial project, run by Google.

• Distributed social networks: One step forward of the previous idea, is that the contents providers were the users. Each person can own a server with standard web services, containing all the information that he wants to provide for any purpose. In this concept is working people from projects like NoseRub

At the moment the trend on mobile platforms is to have all social networks clients together, providing an easy interface that the non-expert user can manage. Inside the different publishing channels of each Open Source mobile platform, and also in other platforms such as iPhone and Windows Mobile, there are several applications for these networks, but they are not using standards. Maybe in a future, social networks will be prepared to collaborate, so users will be able to have their personal data on a single site, maybe in their server, maybe in a web server, or maybe in their mobile phones!