Without any marketing campaigns, Sulake, the creator of the social networking community/chat world Habbo Hotel, put out a mobile community called Mini Friday at the end of 2006.

Mini Friday is a small mobile version of Habbo Hotel: in the beginning the user creates his own character/avatar, and then (s)he can start moving the character around in different rooms, talking to other users and performing some other, small moves to draw attention to himself(?), like dancing in front of a boom box found in the room.

At the moment it’s a small scale test project and works only on 2nd and 3rd edition Nokia S60 phones. The number of rooms is limited and the functionality is simple; perhaps a bit too simple for anyone to spend hours and hours walking in the small spaces and chatting with other users. But the simplicity also means that it’s fast and easy to use, and visually it looks very cute on the mobile screen. Almost feels like a new kind of Tamagotchi in my pocket.

Despite the simplicity and the lack of marketing, over 300 000 users from Finland, Russia and Indonesia, of all places, have already joined Mini Friday. When the functionality gets a bit more advanced, I believe it can become a really exciting mobile extension to Habbo, and even better – it can be branded and redeveloped into different versions for different operators’, communities’ and campaigns’ needs. IronstarHelsinki’s MoiPal, which I haven’t yet tested myself, seems to be already doing that, and they’re playing with the Tamagotchi association.