MOSH is Nokia’s social network entry for their new “We’re a Web 2.0 company too!” push. I’m a firm believer that great mobile apps are and will be backed by great web services in the future, so I think Nokia’s dedication to merging web standards and practices with their devices and mobile apps is a solid move.

What is MOSH? Well it’s a social network for sharing stuff. And I do mean “stuff”. It’s not just limited to pics and videos and blogs. Nokia wants you to share pretty much any media type you want, and with their S60 support for third-party apps, videos, customizations and various document types, they have the perfect platform to pull this off.

So you can share files, great – but what’s the social aspect? Well, they’ve gone through the community how-to playbook and pulled out the old standards: ranking and popularity. Their ranking systems are based on three metrics – how much stuff you create (upload to MOSH), how much stuff you share to other people (this is an active process where you push content to another person), and how much stuff you collect for yourself. You get little wireless signal – style icons to rank how awesome you are at each of these things. Crafting, sharing, and ranking is a solid metric to keep you engaged and promote community champions, but the service really seems most useful for digging through content when you’re bored and mobile.

Being bored and mobile is actually a pretty interesting area to tackle. Let’s face it, when you’re done texting, emailing and have consumed all your sideloaded content like music and video, what if you want something fresh and interesting? Oftentimes browsing the mobile web isn’t an attractive experience. If you’re not actively engaged in a community that you can access from your mobile device like Facebook, or one of the many mobile only social networking sites popping up like IXENLand, you’re likely not going to find interesting things to do on the mobile web.

Of course, the demographic we’re talking about here is people with open data plans. The featurephone users are not going to find content that doesn’t have the carriers nickel and dime-ing them. But those people are probably not going out to discover new mobile content anyway. So let’s just level-set to that at the onset.

Apple has made strides with solving the mobile boredom problem with YouTube integrated on the iPhone. I’d love to see some usage statistics for that. Are people using it on EDGE while mobile or just using it as a novelty when they’re in WiFi range? I’d like to see some stats on YouTube’s WAP site too. The breadth of content on YouTube, given a proper interface for the phone and reasonable download experiences (I believe the iPhone offering does this), would keep bored people entertained for hours while mobile.

Back to MOSH. Nokia has historically had many third-party apps to keep you busy. S60-specific media have had a huge international presence on the web for years, with download sites dedicated to them. Some of the games for S60 are actually compelling, in a mobile phone kinda way. But being able to download this content for free, in a single place, with a powerful search mechanism driving it? For people with Nokia devices, that service is probably the best cure for mobile boredom ever.

Before you dive into the service, you can download an app to your phone and not deal with the browser. Refreshing the catalog in the background and not having to deal with page loads is a big plus right from the start. I’ll choose a native phone app any day over a mobile web page. The only problem is that I can’t get it to work. I’m here on an N75 with an EDGE connection that seems to be fine, but it sits at the Updating Collection List prompt until it times out. Maybe in 3G service it would be better? Maybe it’s beta bugs? Regardless, I had to fall back to the WAP interface.

Though the WAP interface is really basic – they went lowest common denominator for compatibility – you can upload and browse content from the device. Browsing content and searching for “theme” brought up a ton of S60 and S40 themes, many of which were quite good. But that’s a bit unfair – searching for Nokia-specific files on a Nokia service. However, searching for “cartoon” got me a few Bugs Bunny videos. Easily downloaded and watched. Are those copyrighted? Here’s Nokia’s policy:

As between MOSH and its publishers, MOSH publishers own the content they upload. MOSH cautions all its publishers only to upload content that complies with applicable copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, privacy and publicity, and child-protection laws.

So I guess if someone complains, they take it down. Good move for bootstrapping.

Searches for “books” brought up a bunch of ebooks, and “games” brought up a bunch of J2ME and Symbian games. Say what you want, but having this kind of mobile catalog of rich content to browse through when mobile sure solves the mobile boredom problem.

Searching for “Games” on MOSH’s web interface

You can see, I’m not reviewing much of the community aspects here. There’s nothing special to them, aside from being tied to content and giving you the ability to create networks of people and collections of items that you find interesting. This just accelerates getting you to the good stuff next time you’re browsing. In my mind, the breakthrough here is content. S60 has a lot of content already – getting that organized and downloadable while mobile in a fun, easy to use environment is pretty big for these devices.

To get this off of Nokias and into the rest of the world, they’ll need to make it easier to filter by content that will work on your device. There’s so much out there for Windows Mobile and Palm – those are obvious next targets. Extending into paid content isn’t out of the question either. If all that happens (I give it about a 30% chance), watch out Handango - social mobile content catalogs will beat your service hands down.