'Mobile Social Networking' Already Claims Millions Of Users

‘Mobile Social Networking’ Already Claims Millions Of Users

Aug 16, 2007 at 10:26am ET by Greg Sterling

M:Metrics released numbers on mobile social networking in the US and Europe. The U.S. had the largest audience — primarily mobile versions of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook — followed by the U.K., Spain, Germany and France. In the U.S. and Western Europe there were 12.3 million mobile social networkers overall, according to the data.

According to the M:Metrics release:

MySpace and Facebook are the top two social networking sites accessed via mobile in both the U.S. and UK. MySpace attracts 3.7 million U.S. and 440,000 UK mobile users. In America, Facebook’s mobile audience is about 2 million, and in Britain, about 307,000. Rounding out the top three is YouTube in the U.S., with 901,000 mobile visitors and Bebo in the UK, with 288,000.

Ultimately “mobile social networking” shouldn’t be seen simply as the mobile version of established social networking sites; it will be social media functionality as a component of mobile applications of all types.

I have a bit more discussion of the phenomenon at LocalMobileSearch.

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling

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“Ultimately ‘mobile social networking’ shouldn’t be seen simply as the mobile version of established social networking sites; it will be social media functionality as a component of mobile applications of all types.”

I absolutely agree. Social media functionality as a component of mobile applications will evolve over the next yet.

Currently, people are using SMS and even picture mail on mobile phones to post from the phone to web services. They want to say, “Here I am. This is what I am doing!” The masses are also consuming social media on their phones in one-off, non-interactive ways.

Soon, however, this will become interactive, two-way, with a richer mobile experience, not requiring consumers of this content to be sitting in front of a computer. People will start to use pictures and video (along with text) on their phones a lot more to post to social networks/web services, but these services will be able to immediately broadcast user submissions back out to friends’ mobile phones for immediate consumption. Friends will be able to interact with the media, comment on it and share it with others.

In the short term, SMS, MMS, and WAP will be the conduit of this interactivity until it becomes easier, cheaper, and more standardized to actually create custom apps for individual handsets, or the WAP/Web experience improves dramatically on handsets (as the iPhone is showing some promise).
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I guess ‘it will be social media functionality as a component of mobile applications of all types’ isn’t correct. Mobile social networking IS a new personal type of media. After launching personal mobile Linux server in every mobile phones, arriving G4 high-speed networks – we will see that mobile social networkings are absolutely the new water.