More crazy money talk was being bandied around in the world of social networking this week as it emerged that Web 2.0 giant Facebook has been eyeing up Twitter as a potential acquisition.

Facebook, much the darling of the mobile space at present, if recent deals are anything to go by, is believed to have considered snapping up the micro blogging tool, but walked away over a high price tag.

How high? Anything up to $500m if some reports are to be believed - which injects a certain irony into the situation as potential suitors for Facebook, like Yahoo, have in the past been driven off by a high price tag themselves.

Social networking website Friendster keeps its hold on Asian markets by introducing Korean language support for its mobile version. Korean Friendsters who use their phones to access their Friendster account only need to go to m.friendster.com and choose Korean as their language. Language support for Friendster Mobile also available in Chinese (for either mainland or Taiwan), Bahasa and Malay. Mountain View, California-based Friendster claims to have 90 million users, mostly in Asia and specifically the Philippines.

With the markets forecasting the mother of all recessions, capital for startups is getting scarce and entrepreneurs find increasingly hard to raise financing for their companies. So I want to congratulate Rafael Casado, founder of Tooio, on raising a €1,5M round with markets in tough conditions.

Tooio is a Spanish startup developing a mobile social network that allows users to know where their friends are, communicate with them and find places and events close to where they are. Features include SMS, mail and instant messaging, events invitations and a proximity-based mobile search engine.

Minixr is a new Microblogging and lifestreaming platform launched from Algeria.

The service enables users to post and share their status updates, links, different types of files (videos, photos, audio) and events with their friends through the website.

Basic social networking features, enabling users to find and follow their friends, building their own personal network on the service are of course integrated.

The company announced yesterday that it’s site is now available to any and all S60 handsets by way of a shiny new mobile site - you guessed it, m.strands.com. For those unfamiliar with the Strands.com network, it combines messaging features a la Twitter with content aggregation the likes of which you can’t begin to fathom without setting eyes on the laundry list of supported services. Toss some award-winning recommendation technology into the mix, and there you have it.

It’s simple. ClearSky will publish Cellufun content over their distribution network. Cellufun already claims to attract 5 million unique users per month, which is more than enough to make them an attractive proposition for ClearSky, who want as much quality content as possible. In return, ClearSky will make Cellefun hugely more available to its audience of over 2 million customers.

ClearSky has also got well-developed targeted ad placement as part of their platform, which will integrate nicely with Cellufuns ad-funded model.

Have you ever been somewhere interesting and later couldn’t remember exactly where it was? Perhaps you know someone who might find a particular place interesting but they don’t know where it is? Looking for ideas of interesting places to go? Or simply want to know where your friends hang out? Wouldn’t it be great if you could grab your phone and tag your current location, or other places of interest, then search from a list of locations using keywords, for example - find a nearby Cafe or Park ? Perhaps Tagggit can help.

Mytalk, an early stage mobile networking firm, today announced that it has selected PointAbout's thin client mobile device applications to power Mytalk's proximity aware social networking service and opt-in mobile advertising platform.

Mytalk is developing a proximity aware services portal with powerful and easy-to-use mobile networking capabilities, including the ability to identify other members from closest to furthest based on proximity, and communicate via text or voice - quickly, easily and safely.

Not that anyone really needs to see what photos you take, where you take them and what videos are captured during your daily walk through the game of life, but if you feel inclined to share, Nokia's making it exceptionally easy. The viNe service, which is compatible with a slew of E and N Series handsets, taps into your built-in GPS receiver and uploads your media to the viNe website in order for others to keep track. Think real-time social networking, driven by your cellphone. Yeah, it's a touch too voyeuristic for our tastes, but you know you want to give it a go. Hit the read link to explore.

White-label social networking startup KickApps has raised a C round of $14m with a new lead investor, North Atlantic Capital. Existing investors Softbank, Spark Prism and Jarl Mohn also participated. Some examples of branded social networks built on KickApps include fan sites for the San Francisco 49ers, and Gossip Girl, Rachel Ray's Incredible People, as well as NPR's get-out-the-vote site and the now-defunct McCainSpace.

On the drivers of mobile social networking: No longer are smartphone devices solely meant for business. Because you have smartphone adoption with easier text input, richer graphical experiences, those attribute themselves to a better social networking experience on a device. They also raise the consumer’s expectations as to what they can do on the phone. You have a full circle about smartphone adoption and the expectation that because you have a smartphone you’ll get a better experience.Another thing helping the adoption of MySpace and communication applications in general are all-you-can-eat data plans and the proliferation of them.

Market leader Nokia understands what services offerings consumers like best, a recent Nokia study on device usage shows that Email has really taken off in 2008 and demonstrates increased use of Music, Maps Browsing and Social Networking. While devices are becoming more powerful, hardware vendors push services and end users more and more use the services available to them.

Mobilhood is a new, free and exciting global social networking service that allows its users to easily create/upload, download and share mobile content such as ringtones, wallpapers, videotones and screensavers with other users from all over the world. It also allows its users to win cool prizes by gathering points based on the activities they perform within the community.

It's called ShoutEm and it's a resource that you can use to create your own microblogging resource - your own private Twitter in other words. However, there are a few differences that you can see at once. I can embed photographs directly into posts, I can link directly to other resources such as YouTube, and play the video directly from the site.

It also has support for geo location sharing and mobile browser support (coming shortly apparently).

Online dating community has always been a vibrant patchwork of people seeking everything from a life partner down to a one night stand. Innovation in this market is often pursued by tough competition, but a new contender hopes to break away from the pack with location-based dating. Enter meetMoi, a freshly launched site that pairs a mobile app to a powerful social search network.

The makers of Habbo Hotel, the wildly popular virtual world game aimed at teenagers, have quietly released a mobile version called Mini Friday that is seeing steady growth: It’s about to hit a million registered users.

That’s a robust number, keeping in mind that the application requires download and registration, is restricted to users 18 or older, and runs only on select phones (Nokia S60 series). The company also hasn’t really talked about the product.

FileRide is a Stockholm-based social network with a twist: FileRide creates a social network for you, based around the files that are already on your computer. Overall, FileRide's feature set is impressive and we barely have the space to touch upon its core services here. It includes a micro-blogging service, a Facebook-like wall (the 'Smorgasbord'), the ability to subscribe to newsfeeds from your friends and groups, as well as desktop alerts when new chats or comments appear in a group you follow. The desktop software will also display relevant blog posts and Wikipedia entries.[Editor comment - this is a candidate for going "socially mobile")

Mobile operators and device manufacturers have poured billions of dollars into upgrading networks, trialing new services, adding more pixels to camera phones, and launching slick advertising campaigns. At the same time, they’ve paid very little attention to making the phonebook – perhaps the mobile phone’s most critical and ubiquitous feature – easier to use. That’s too bad because aside from making life easier for their subscribers and increasing the phonebook’s usability and usefulness, operator revenues would increase via enriched social connections that are easily accessible in the phonebook.

That’s just what the social address book is beginning to do.

Leading social music site imeem has added mobile advertising capabilities to their Android music streaming application, opening up the opportunity for brands to connect with mobile consumers. The first advertiser to employ the system will be Kia for the launch of the Kia Soul compact SUV.

Hard to believe really but perhaps there is some truth to it... New Zealand apparently leads the way when it comes to what I call 'mixing realities', that is, mixing virtuals and actuals in everyday life. The NZ Herald reports on a new Vodafone survey claiming that "mobile phones and social networking sites like Facebook have near-revolutionized the ways Kiwis communicate". The only surprising thing about this claim is that it has taken this long for mainstream institutions to recognize the changing reality inaugurated by ICTs in Kiwi-land. It's not as though such things as mobiles and online communities have not revolutionized other nations also, notably, Korea, Japan, Europe and the USA.