Danah Boyd wrote a blog post recently about how MySpace has turned into a giant ad-filled mess. She hopes that soon-to-be launched Blyk, pan-European free mobile phone operator (funded by advertising) for 16-24 year olds, will figure out how to do marketing without alienating people:

I believe that teenagers are the reason that mobile will happen sooner than we think. I don’t believe that the first explosion will be US-based. I am very hopeful about Blyk because i think that they stand a very decent chance of getting cluster effects working. (Note: the anti-corporate voice in me screams in horror at the idea of a free mobile service built on ads but there’s no one i trust more in mobile than Marko Ahtisaari. I have much respect for the whole team and i think that a free phone will be extremely popular so long as they get a few things right.) I think that mobile social network-driven systems will look very different than web-based ones but the fundamentals of “friends” and “messages” and some form of presence-conveying “profile” will be core to the system.

Blyk will launch first in the UK market in mid-2007, with other markets to follow.

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