LOCATION BASED COMMUNITY SERVICES NEW SERVICES FOR A NEW TYPE OF WEB COMMUNITIES

Mobile communities are considered to be the next logical evolutional step of the existing virtual communities on the internet. The extension of web-based virtual communities with new community-orientated mobile services is expected to be enormously attractive – from the community user’s point of view as well as from the mobile operators’ point of view. Mobile communities and mobile community services are a very innovative topic. Despite all these great expectations, no empirical experiences have been made yet regarding this topic, since mobile communities are currently developed. Against this background, this paper first describes the phenomenon and characteristics of mobile communities (in contrast to the existing virtual web communities). As it is expected, that location based services will play a major role in 2.5 and 3 generation mobile networks, in the next chapter some services that had been developed within the research project COSMOS (Community Online Services and MObile Solutions) are described before some explorative findings of a pilot test of these services are presented. They show that the judgements of the attractiveness of such services don’t match the actual usage.