Facebook on iPhoneThe iPhone is the killer social networking device when mobile. The ability to easily and comfortably access email as well as a variety of popular social networking sites using native iPhone applications places the device squarely in the center of the social media triangle. While there are plenty of additional uses for the device, it almost seems pointless – why bother owning an iPhone if your usage goal does not involve some form of social networking?

It would appear that the iPhone was designed with social applications in mind. Although the location-awareness feature requires the user to allow an application to use the current location, the mere fact that applications are capable of accessing this information speaks volumes about what the iPhone OS developers had in mind.

The brilliant minds behind this engineering marvel had enough foresight to realize the enormous potential of tapping in to location-based services. The engineers opted to provide applications the capability of accessing location, thus offering third-party developers the opportunity to provide uniquely social applications to users based on their location.

But it is not only the location-aware features that make the iPhone the killer social networking device – it is the native iPhone applications coupled with the ability to swiftly access the Internet via 3G or WiFi, depending on availability. The mere fact that just about any and all social networking sites are within a fingers reach no matter where the user is located is leaps and bounds ahead of your average mobile phone.

The iPhone offers a much smoother mobile computing experience when compared to most other similar devices not because it is the “Jesus-phone” but because the experience is so fluid. Using applications like the Facebook or MySpace apps, while somewhat buggy overall, are far more productive than trying to access the sites from within Mobile Safari. Integration with the OS allows applications to perform functions not possible with Mobile Safari.

When Apple debuts the push notification service in iPhone OS 3.0 this summer expect social networking application functionality to increase dramatically. Social networking sites will benefit greatly from this specific feature because of the implications of immediately notifying users of new requests, information, @mentions and a host of other things.

Rather than waiting for users to pull information, applications will have this data pushed so they can display data to the user without requiring the user to open the app. For example, when new @mentions arrive on Tweetie a numeric badge superimposed on the app icon, similar to what happens when new mail arrives, will be incremented with the number of unread @mentions.

So this all begs the question – why bother purchasing an iPhone if you are not going to use it for the social features?

I posit that if the use is to read and compose email, do some light web browsing and obviously talk on the phone, then the iPhone is a great purchase. If the plan is to get knee-deep in social networking then the iPhone is the killer device.

However, if the device is going to be used just to read email and rarely do anything else then why bother? It makes no sense to spend all that money every month just to read email when you are not even going to take a few minutes to respond. The iPhone should be integrated in to ones life to supplement or add to their social networking, not to be used as a glorified email reading device, especially when most mobile phones are quite capable of reading email.

The iPhone, for all its positives and negatives, is truly the only mobile device of its kind in the realm of “killer mobile social networking device” possibility. The Palm Pre looks pretty damn cool but it is currently vaporware. Android is promising but has yet to show any signs of genius. Until there is strong competition in this space expect the iPhone to remain the grand champion for the foreseeable future.