HP is testing a new social network application for cell phones. The idea is simple, it is a little bit like msn messenger, you can see your friends pictures, name, offline/online, city and some information about the local time and weather of where they from. So far nothing very exciting…

The main idea it is to only promote the friends that you‘re actually contacting regularly. The application will show (promote) only people that you really know and interact via phone, text or other social media sites. We call that ‘Intimate Social Network’.

Intimate Social Network from HP

The new trends in social media will be increasingly about intimate social networking. Who cares about the pictures on Facebook of somebody that you meet twice at work and some random people you maybe never see? How many of your Facebook (or MySpace) friends are you really in contact with? Realistically, probably not a lot…

Also more and more people are worry about the access of personal information to random people or co-workers. This is why the next generation of social media websites or applications will look more like your MSN Messenger (or at least mine) with only the people that you actually personally interact with.

Intimate Social Network goes a little back to basics of social media networking, where the only contacts were people you actually knew. This will be a major change for Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter where the number of friends/followers is commonly understood as popularity.

Personally I think that is a good thing that people focus more on ‘true’ friends than cyberspace ‘acquaintances’.