Lots of interesting conversations took place here at Informa’s Off-Deck Mobile Content Conference last week but I had the opportunity to bump into Paul Smith from MPulse again and he showed me some pretty damn cool things on MPulse’s off-deck WapTags.

You will find this article interesting if you are into things like mobile blog aggregators, and mobile social networking and tagging.

For those of you that are not already familiar with WapTags its a mobile aggregator that works on a social networking tag like system for the mobile web. mPulse’s was a mobile marketing company that started WapTags when they noticed that brands and bands need a way to keep their opt-in mobile moblists fresh and engaged. Mpulse’s Waptags is a mobile community portal where users can share aggregated content such as blogs, comments etc. The mPulse software lets people search for and share the best mobile sites and stores; tour chat rooms; read up on news and blogs; connect with missed-connections and now check out real-time classified ads.

Don’t get me wrong, the other applications, such as blog aggregation and chartrooms are really neat but it is the systems ability to create and bring CraigLists like applications such as classifieds and “missed connections” to the ubiquitous medium of the mobile phone and SMS that really peaked my interest.

The mPulse system works by visiting waptags.com on your mobile device and then entering a keyword to search for stores, blogs or classifieds tagged with that keyword by users on the system. The result for the keyword “shoes,” for example, look like this:

As you can see, the results show me sites and stores tagged “shoes” by mPulse users. To find classified adds or blogs and news tagged “shoes” all I must do is click those respective links shown and separated here as #6 and #7. The selection to search for “members” that associate themselves with the tag “shoes” and “chatrooms” going on about “shoes” got cut off from the screen capture but are options that are available as well.

Here is what searching for MOpocket and clicking “Blogs and News” looks like with a sample post:

As you can see it is one of the few mobile blog aggregators that successfully also portrays pictures.

But lets get back to “shoes” and the classifieds. Clicking on “classified ads” after doing a search for “shoes” brings us to a page which shows me if anybody has created a classified add with the tag word “shoes.” In this case I am in luck. It tells me that “1 person offers this now.” But the neat thing is that I can also sign myself up to receive a text message when someone wants “shoes” or someone is offering “shoes.” The text message I receive will then provide we with a Wap push that brings me directly to the classified.

Clicking “One person is offering this now” brings us to a site that tells me that “Jane who is a 29 year old female from New York City is offering shoes. Clicking her name then brings me to a form like portal where I can send Jane a text message asking for more information as to what shoes she is offering etc etc as well as tell her more about me etc etc… Of course after that point a free exchange off anonymous communication can take place until the two parties choose to share more information.

This part of the whole classified section needs some work, however, in that the actual “classified” part of the classifieds is missing. But Paul Smith, CEO and founder of mPulse has assured me that it is coming and reminds me that the system is currently in beta. But for something that is in beta it sure has picked up a nice plethora of users from around the world. Smith has no records of any successful interactions yet but says that he is working on that as well by adding a report section as well as a “tell your WapTag success story sweepstakes of sort.” The blog aggregator and mobile wap page tagging also gets heavy user traffic.

Smith has also told me that he is working on a “missed connections” mobile application. For those of you that don’t know what missed connections are visit the Craiglist missed connection page of any location. They are classifieds of missed connections like the girl on the subway who’s eyes met yours or the cute boy you saw checking you out at the Banana Republic on 86th Street. Anyways, people then go on to Craigslist and post about their encounter hoping that the other person has either done the same and or is checking the site to see if the person has written about it as well. There have been recorded success stories and, Smith tells me, women around the country read them daily at the office or during lunch breaks because each one is like a mini Harlequin novel of sorts.

Smith is currently working on adding a missed connections mobile to the mPulse software services so that people can post and check for their romantic happening almost immediately after they happen. Of course if people find each other they, like the classifieds, immediately cant start communicating via SMS.

I think that this classified meets SMS thing has some pretty interesting potential. Some things need to be worked out though like, for one thing, the actual classified part. But it is also important to consider what type of things a person would sell using a mobile classifieds service that could not wait until getting home and using Craigslist. The “unfiltered” version has a lot of sex stuff, as any open classified section is expected to have. That is inevitable. They key now is to see how and for what this system can best be used beyond sex on the go. And we are just beginning to find that out, Smith tells me.

No matter what though I think that mPulse is up to something here and has their finger on a pretty interesting part of the ubiquitous pulse of mobile.

To try Waptags for yourself visit Waptags on your mobile phone by visiting http://mp.waptags.com

“The Craigslist Bible: How to Earn $10,000 a Month Using the World’s Greatest (And Free) Website” (Adam Hunt)

Technorati Tags: classified, craigslist, harlequin, mPulse, sms, text messaging, waptags

This entry was posted on Monday, July 17th, 2006 at 11:40 am and is filed under SMS/TXT/MMS, Mobile Web, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.