0.8m UK and over 4 million US mobile subscribers now access social networking sites on their phones

Mobile social network itsmy.com announced its support to the US automotive industry with 100 million free of cost mobile web page impressions for brand advertising with banners. The social campaign will be displayed between January and March 2009 in mobile Internet for customers of all carriers in the US.

A social survey conducted with more than 1,000 respondents within itsmy.com in December 2008 has shown that 81% would love to support the automotive industry which is so heavily affected by the financial crisis.

Has the mobile industry stumbled on the killer app that it had just agreed to agree doesn't exist? Certainly, from Shozu to Ovi, it was the hot topic of 2008

Right back in February, when Yahoo! announced the second of its One range of mobile services - this time a presence enabled messaging service that put your SMS, email, IM and social network conversations all in one place, categorized by user, not by "Service" - things seemed to be pointing to social networking as a key driver for the year.

Although the base of mobile social network users in the US is currently small, it is growing quickly. The percentage of mobile phone users who said they accessed social networks from their handset jumped 182% from September 2007 to October 2008, according to a study conducted by The Kelsey Group and ConStat.

Mobile social network Loopt goes live on three AT&T phones today, which was the last major carrier holdout. Loopt is now available in the U.S. on Sprint, Verizon, Metro PCS, T-Mobile and Boost. The service is free for a year and then a $4/month fee kicks in.

You can get Loopt for free on the iPhone (and there is a TechCrunch version), the Blackberry and Android as well.

We’re big believers that mobile is the future of social networking. Loopt and a handful of other brave startups are pushing the envelope on mobile social networks while the big guys, Facebook and MySpace, sit on the sidelines.

Social media mobile marketing company AirGini (http://www.airgini.com) has today announced the private beta launch of Thumbdive (http://www.thumbdive.com), a new iPhone and desktop PC web app for friends to interact and share content from the web’s most popular social sites.

Aimed at urban professionals with active lifestyles, a global network of friends and who value their privacy, Thumbdive is a free service which enables members to feel closer to their friends and family throughout the day without having their conversations broa

The cellity Communicator goes into open beta mode today. The application, which can be used on any phone that supports Java (not just smartphones), acts as a contact aggregator and communications tool.
The latest addition to Communicator, Addressbook2.0, can access and store contact information from pretty much any source. Phone contact lists, Outlook, email providers like Gmail and Hotmail, social networking sites… all your contact information can be accessed and saved from these sources.

Shares in Japanese social networking site operator Gree Incsoared 45 percent in their debut on the Tokyo bourse on Wednesday, becoming a rare bright spot in this year's lacklustre IPO market. The networking site first started as a PC service but now earns most of its revenue from its mobile service after it tied with KDDI Corp, Japan's No. 2 wireless carrier. KDDI holds a 7.6 percent stake in Gree.
Gree shares first traded on the Mothers market at 5,000 yen, 52 percent higher than the IPO price of 3,300 yen. They pared gains to end the day at 4,800 yen, up 45 percent.

The report provides global forecasts for future revenue generation and subscriber uptake of services in this area of the industry. The key to success for mobile communities and user generated content is the convergence of fixed and mobile services. Operators need to realise that members of existing communities will still want to interact with those communities and to do this via mobile, they need to be able to access those existing communities.

Vodafone has announced that it's done a worldwide deal with Last.fm to bring scrobbling and social networking features to its customers' mobile handsets.

Initially available on several Nokia handsets, including the N95, N96, N78 and 6210, with other handsets being added soon, the application will allow access to Last.fm's social music features and online music profile.

Zannel, the instant media network used by millions to share pictures, videos and text from mobile phones and the web, today announced CityWatch by Zannel, a new location-based iPhone application which allows users to instantly see, share, and talk about what's going on around them.
Now available at the Apple App Store, CityWatch enables users to select a location on an easy-to-maneuver map which shows the latest multimedia and text updates, including pictures imported from Flickr. CityWatch users can also post their own geo-tagged updates to start real-time discussions around them via threaded commenting.

The simplest and most powerful form of mobile activism in the future will probably still be ordinary communication. However, in all fields of activism such as advocacy, awareness, research and protest, the mobile phone can be a strategic tool for communication, collaboration, coordination and collective action. In this regard we have only started to tap upon the potential of this all-purpose tool, being it in ownership by a majority of Africans across the continent.
However if one wants to look at some likely future scenarios and potentials for advanced mobile usage, then 4 trends could be particularly promising for mobile activism.

Mobile Choice UK is reporting on a special tariff available for the new INQ1 handset from 3. As you may know, the INQ has been delivered by an offshoot of Hutchison, essentially a new handset vendor.

The INQ1 has been gaining lots of press attention (including ours, here) for the fact it integrates tons of social network features across services like Windows Live Messenger, and the daddy of SN, Facebook.

Anyhoo, the tariff is as so: £15/month for 18months gives the handset for free, with unlimited mobile internet, text messages, “3-to-3″ calls, and finally, 75 mins to any network. Add a fiver to that tariff, and you can have 200 x-network minutes.

When you take the INQ1 out of the box it feels like a quality device with its solid metal and plastic construction. However that illusion was shattered when I switched it on, as the display looks like a low end device and the icons and menus have a basic appearance. Instead of a user guide in the box there are a series of ‘flash’ cards which explain the principle applications. Although I thought the info was a bit thin it probably reflects the fact that non geeks rarely read user guides and just dive straight in! The full user guide is on the CD along with the PC Suite software for copying contacts, photos etc to your PC. Overall the handset’s performance is sluggish and the software seems fairly buggy as the it rebooted several times when I was trying out applications. Not a good start and may mean it has to go back.

Now to move on to the INQ1 as a social networking device.

The mobile social networking market is best described as emerging. With a very large number of startups and unformed business models shaped loosely around Internet-based equivalents, the mobile social networking industry has a long way to go before it reaches maturity and mass adoption. Nonetheless, mobile social networks are garnering a great deal of interest from mobile operators, hardware vendors, ISPs, and major brands, as a means of connecting users, reducing churn, enabling advertising revenues, and facilitating access to other forms of mobile content.

According to a recent ABI Research study, consumers using mobile social networks today are mainly checking messages, status updates and comments of friends rather than posting photos or comments themselves. However, this pattern is changing as more consumers have access to better-equipped phones and social network applications that allow for easy uploading and communication.

DialPlus ( www.dialplus.net) enriches the standard phone call experience by automatically and simultaneously providing dynamic, contextually relevant visual information about the called or calling party before the call is answered, during the call and after the call is over. DialPlus makes it easy for users to engage in mobile social networking or to get information about a business they're speaking with, such as directions, menus and reviews.

The trend however is expected to change over time with more consumers sharing photos and using social network messaging and e-mail, which will translate to longer and more frequent usage of social networks on mobile. With better and technologically equipped phones coming into the market, the pattern should see a change with uploading and communication becoming easier. A recent study too substantiates this by indicating that “mobile phone usage is ‘growing up’ and changes communication with friends and family as well as the traditional Internet usage dramatically”.

Zannel calls itself an instant media network. It's a social network, similar to Twitter, that enables its users to use various rich media assets in their status updates.

The social network, focused on visual bloggers and entertainers, can be used on over 1000 phones using the mobile web and WAP, or via the internet. You can update images, video and text with a single click.

Facebook released some new stats on mobile usage tonight:

* In the first 24 hours after status commenting was released on Facebook’s standard mobile website, users made over 1 million status comments.
* The number of “active users” (which Facebook normally defines to be active in the last 90 days) of Facebook mobile services has grown from 5 million at the beginning of this year to 15 million today

Mobile Social Networking Forum – www.socialnetworking-forum.com - will showcase the leading mobile social networking publishers demonstrating that subscriber growth in mobile has the potential to overtake PC. The conference will hear from established mobile social networking platforms including Meet Moi, Zyb, Limbo and Buongiorno's new mobile social platform. blinko.