From Global Village to a Local Village

If 2007 was when social sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook went ballistic, then 2008 may be remembered as the year when networks went local and mobile. People love to listen to music, gossip, exchange videos or have a spamless way of emailing with friends. But they don't just want to do it at work or at home but where they are and when they want. Existing networks are already migrating their services to mobiles but unless you have a biggish screen (such as the iPhone) the experience won't be memorable. The question is whether the likes of MySpace will win or whether the local market will be captured by nimble start-ups harnessing the twin strengths of the mobile: content that can be supplied instantly by users plus the ability to harness the power of GPS chips now appearing in smart phones that not only know who you are but where you are.

Global networks might seem so powerful they are bound to shift existing customers to mobiles. But it doesn't always work like that. Just as dotcom giants such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft failed to create sites to thwart MySpace or Facebook, so those sites won't necessarily triumph against a new era of start-ups building communities from the bottom up.

Who will win? In theory, well established sites using postcodes as such as yell.com or 192.com - the two market leaders - or even upmystreet.com, one of the survivors of the dotcom boom, are in with a big chance. For instance, 192.com soon found lots of data about me, including who my neighbors are (from the electoral roll) and most of the nearby restaurants and pubs - including some I didn't know about - with an aerial map that makes Google look out of date. It can also track down where your phone is (with your permission) and is used by poker sites to check applicants' ages. But it is weak on user-generated content, and two thirds of its services are paid for, which is good for the bottom line now but won't necessarily be the revenue model for the new community sites.

One of the most interesting new ones is qype.com, which models itself on the highly successful yelp.com of the US. Qype started last June as a pan-European site that claims 500,000 visits a month in the UK and is growing at 50% every two months. Rob Hinchcliffe, its UK community manager, claims people are moving away from "time-suck" networks such as Facebook towards socially useful ones that "help make our lives easier as well as fostering online networks and micro communities". I was impressed that there were seven reviews of a local curry restaurant. From this week, he says, users will be able to post YouTube videos of restaurants or clubs they are reviewing. It also has a stripped-down option for small-screen phones in which you simply insert a street or postcode and what you are looking for.

Interesting contenders include welovelocal.com (which I have already reviewed); trustedplaces.com, which is building up reviews from users; and outside.com, which homes in on postcode data from local galleries to Burke's Peerage (though typing postcodes into Google can be just as good). Mygamma.com, which has been nominated for a Best Mobile Social Networking award, looks promising but kept sending me back to a mobile gaming site, which was disconcerting.

Another one, gypsii.com, which has just landed a contract with China, was slow to load but looks interesting: you select where you are and it tells you how far other restaurants, interesting houses etc are with user-generated photos - though it had a disconcerting habit of producing restaurants thousands of miles away. Others include, touchlocal.com (where, in theory, you can read others' views of local plumbers), toptable.co.uk, beerintheevening.com, plus, of course all the local interest you can find on our own Guardian sites such as guardianrestaurantbookings.co.uk. And all this is without mentioning Google's as yet unrevealed plans to capture this space for itself.