Update: Please see my comment after the end of this post for my opinion of the application after using it for nearly a week.

In a big shot across the bow of companies like Fring, Nokia and many others, Vodafone has just opened up the beta program for their new mobile social network. Please welcome to the stage, Pocket Life.

In one single place, you can integrate all your social networks, communicate with all your contacts, see on a map where people are at the current time, share photos and a lot more. All from a modern cellphone.

Pocket Life is a web and mobile service that offers a seamless, integrated experience for communication, social networking, location based services, street and satellite mapping.

Pocket Life was designed around your group of friends, allowing you to communicate and interact in ways never before possible. Seamless synchronisation of the information across web and mobile devices as well as synchronisation across selected social networks is a cornerstone of Pocket Life.

You maintain full control of what you share by placing your contacts in Groups and only sharing what you enable with specific Groups.

You are able to store and remember your favourite memories, whether this is the spot where you got engaged, your favourite mountain bike trail or even just to keep a record as to how you are progressing on your daily jog.

Pocket Life website

For quite a long time, Nokia has been building something very similar and is just starting to put it all together with their new Ovi service. However, at the moment, that service is still not fully integrated across their platforms. Nokia Chat is not yet integrated with Nokia Email to form the promised “Nokia Messaging”. Nokia Chat does integrate with Nokia Maps to provide location aware messaging and so on. You can also upload your photos directly to Ovi from your phone. However, it doesn’t yet integrate with social networks. For that you need Nokia FriendConnect. So there are lots of pieces, and the intention is to integrate them into the Ovi service, but they’re not there yet.

Fring provides messaging services that integrate with all the major IM networks including MSN, Skype and Google Talk for voice. It also supports standard text IM messaging with AOL/ICQ, Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook. Fring includes the ability to share your location with the web, but the location services are separated from the messaging services. Nor does it support any sort of photo sharing service other than sending a file using the native IM service file transfer methods.

I use Fring a lot, but I really only use Nokia Email and Nokia Maps from Nokia. None of my friends have S60 enabled cellphones and so most of those others are a waste of storage space on my phone. And even then, I find myself using Google Mobile Maps more than Nokia Maps because the turn by turn route planning is free and backed by Streetview.

Then there are services like ShoZu that aren’t so much about messaging as much as they are about content. Share geo-tagged photos and videos, download photos and videos from the social networks. Comment on the content and see other comments. I don’t use it at all, but the short trial I did of it showed it had a lot of promise… if you create lots of media content and share it on the web. Which I don’t.

But Vodafone’s new Pocket Life is the first service that actually integrates all these kinds of features into a single product if the marketing is to be believed.

Where it gets interesting is that Vodafone do not lock it down to only being available for Vodafone customers. Its an internet based service rather than a Vodafone network based service. So if you’re on Telecom in New Zealand, or T-Mobile in the US or Orange in France, you can still participate in this network if your phone can install the client.

Which brings us to a pretty heavy hitter. At the moment, you need a Symbian/S60 based phone or a Blackberry to run the service. That includes Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, but completely excludes all the Windows Mobile phones out there (of which there are a significant number.) Also coming soon is a version for the iPhone. However whether this is caught in the mess that is the App Store vetting process or just not yet finished, I cannot say.

So, I’m going to start using it and give it a go. Unfortunately for me, most of my friends are Luddites and do not have a phone that will run it yet. In fact, I think only Nick qualifies as someone with a decent phone (Samsung G800.) Mostly because everyone else still thinks a phone is solely for messaging and talking to people.

And only wankers and Apple fanbois have iPhones. :-P