No surprise the iPhone 3G reviews of the last days show a lot of enthusiasm and indicate that the iPhone with geo intelligence and cool mobile social networking apps will become the “social web device of the year”.

The iPhone, with cult-like users and location aware technology, is the perfect social networking device. Earlier this year we speculated that someone would emerge with a killer social networking app for the iPhone. It turns out that there are lots of contenders. Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch

Today Michael Arrington looks at the barriers:

MySpace and Facebook are sitting on the sidelines while these new networks try to get a foothold. And it’s all because of privacy concerns and fear of litigation.

Here I would like to add that the privacy issue and “social noise” concerns have to be taken seriously. It is time for a more systematic approach. The iPhone, Loopt etc. are only little pieces in the big picture, i.e. the coming “moss web”. The what?!

What is the moss web?
Some time ago, when I thought about the trends and emerging technologies in the very near future I was looking for a concept that could express the coming fusion of the trends to one integrated new environment of devices and applications – and social activity patterns. There was none, so I abbreviated the monstrous wording “mobile social semantic web” to the acronym mo-s-s web, that’s all.

Characterstics and challenges of the moss web
In the user perspective the user experience will be characterised by ubiquity, continuity and transparency of the surroundings – geo, social, business, events. Ok, ubiquity and continuity mean just convenience and a lot of new valuable services (take the iPhone apps as a reference). But with transparency (and possible asymmmetric transparency) there comes the challenge. Michael is mentioning the lawyers concerns but they
are just the effect, not the cause of the challenge which comes with the new transparency features and tools.

Certainly privacy rights need to be considered, (..). But they can be addressed by allowing users to opt out of showing others their location, or only showing it to certain types of people (by age range, sex, friends of friends, etc.). And minors can be permanently segmented from older age groups as well. Michael Arrington

The quote shows that to “address the privacy rights” is not that easy and the demand for smart “social identity management” and “privacy business” will open up some possibilities for new services. There will be some companies out there delivering apps with the right balance between the complexity of the moss web (dynamic social graph, contextual semantics) and the needs of users for smooth and unobtrusive “social navigation”.