The Next Paradigm Shift in the Mobile Ecosystem: Mobile Social Computing and the Increasing Relevance of Users

Social computing has become the paradigm for the increasingly relevant role of users in the Internet world. In this paper, it is argued that mobile social computing will eventually cause an even bigger impact in the mobile ecosystem. We are already at the beginning of the "transference" of a significant part of Internet social computing usage to the mobile domain, where users are no longer passive consumers of content andapplications, but co-creators and even innovators of them. However, mobile social computing will go one step further in the contribution to the development of the mobile ecosystem, since it will put the many situations of users' daily activities at the centre stage. To prove this case, this paper gathers available data and evidence on the patterns of mobile social computing usage and discusses user innovation and user empowerment in the framework of the current mobile ecosystem.