The other day I asked somewhat tongue-in-cheek whether Tom Friedman had ever visited Silicon Valley. Today, I’m wondering if Lady Greenfield has ever used a social networking site.

The professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford and the director of the Royal Institution has the United Kingdom up in a tizzy about the idea that Facebook, Bebo and Twitter are warping their children’s minds.

She warned that social networking sites “are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilized, characterized by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize and a shaky sense of identity.”

Zcapes is a hybrid mobile blogging and social networking system, which is adjusted to the screen of mobile phones. The service enables people to connect and join groups. Furthermore the system automaticly adds messages about the choosen blog topic from other social networks, Twitter and Flickr and adds maps relevant to the location of events. By the automaticly added content the service aims to deliver relevant information to the members, which is more up to date and faster than data supplied by search engines. The latter makes the service useful especially for event coverage. Zcapes has just launched a couple of days ago.

At GSMA’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona mobieTV, the leader in mobile interactive entertainment and TV broadcasting, presented an exciting new social network community TV and video service specifically designed for the iPhone community. The service is an extension of mobieTV’s current mobile TV and video offering and also includes hosting, content sourcing, front-end browser design and development.

Social networking site Twitter is going mobile with the launch of a new service for its Canadian customers.

The site has signed an agreement with mobile operator Bell Mobility that will allow customers to activate a full, two-way SMS service.

"If you're a Bell Mobility customer, you can update Twitter via SMS and receive updates from Twitter via SMS," explained Twitter on its blog.

The move highlights the growing value of social networking sites in ecommerce, with information now being downloaded to mobiles so that people need never be out of touch with their social networks.

Businesses can help to significantly enhance their brand recognition and status by tapping into the potential of social networking sites like Twitter and those already using these sites will be pleased to hear of the move into mobile technology.

Buzzwire has announced a ad-supported mobile community site where people can share content from around the Web, and help influence an editorially-driven guide to the mobile Internet, MediaPost reports. Wake me when it's over. Seriously, there have been so many mobile social networking services over the past few years, that I'm having trouble with the announcement of yet another—especially now that MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube top the charts even on mobile devices.

Social networking ruled the coop at Barcelona's Mobile World Congress this year. According to Reuters, most visits to social networks are still made by people sitting at computers; but the spontaneous nature of socnet discussions makes the medium a perfect partner to mobile — a topic of especial interest to enterprising carriers.

According to News Corp.'s MySpace, users visiting the site from mobile phones quadrupled last year to 20 million, out of a total of 135 million uniques in toto. Facebook reported a similar climb.

Nokia has created a mobile social networking site called Mosh. There’s an online and mobile component for this social network, giving you cross-platform access for networking and media-sharing. While Sprint-Nextel has added more access to existing networks via mobile devices, Nokia has created one of its own. The site is currently in private beta, and I’ve taken a test run of the network.

On Mosh, you can upload content to your own profile, including audio, videos, documents, images, games and applications. Browse for other content on Mosh, where you can take three actions for each item: share, collect, or download. Sharing lets you send the item to friends via SMS or email, collecting lets you bookmark the item, and downloading is self-explanatory. For each item, you can also vote it up or down by indicating if you “like it” or “love it” and leave a comment.

Blame the i-Phone if you want, but get over it - and quickly.

OK, so you've barely gotten a handle on social networking as it applies to your business and now this thing has gone mobile!

It's easy to grumble, curse and maybe smash an i-Phone or Blackberry, but this violence is counterproductive when really you need to understand why social networks are fighting for mobile dominance.

You already have an idea. It's why we call the BlackBerry the "CrackBerry." These addictive little devices hold our lives, making our relationship to them a bittersweet one because we can't seem to live without texting and emailing while we walk down the street.

The emerging Social Web is exerting a powerful influence on the online space. Traffic patterns and search engine rank are feeling the influence of prime movers like Facebook, Digg, Flickr and Twitter, and old school e-commerce strategies for promoting findability may well lose their advantage as these new forms propagate. Dayna Bateman, Sr. Strategic Analyst for Fry, Inc., will speak to how the architecture of the Social Web and the rise of Mobile promises to influence e-commerce in the years ahead, and address some of the ways online merchants -- and those who design for e-commerce -- can incorporate these models in their site designs.

Easy-to-use smartphone interfaces, like BlackBerry and iPhone, have given mobile social networking a big boost. A recent Nielsen survey showed social networking was the fastest growing sector of mobile Internet use from November 2007 to November 2008.

“Over 300 million SMSs were sent just from social networking sites in Q3 of 2008,” said Jerry Rocha, senior director of Mobile Media and Advertising at Nielsen Mobile. Mobile convergence applications are popping up faster than users can Twitter, chirp and chat about them, which appears to be broadening the playing field for social networks big and small. People are connecting with one another on their mobile phones, and they’re doing it in increasingly sophisticated ways.

Laurel Papworth told Australian Women Online, “If you block Facebook or You Tube at work, your staff will resort to using their work mobile phone to access these services. So if you block social networking sites at work, people will find another way and it may work out to be more expensive for the employer.”

CEO Vince Staybl has big ambitions for the mobile-only social net founded in 2006: he wants itsmy to have the same impact as MTV did when it first emerged. The site builds its community of users around entertainment services, including "social gaming" and "social TV." Users, for example, have the ability to create their own TV channel, where they can upload mobile video clips for others to watch.

Everybody at this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona wanted to be the new best friend of the social networks.

From the world's biggest phone maker, Nokia, to tiny Irish semiconductor start-up Movidia, delegates to the wireless industry's biggest annual gathering couldn't stop talking about Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

The majority of visits to such online communities are still made by people sitting at a computer telling their friends where they are and how they are feeling, exchanging opinions on their favorite movies and music or uploading videos.

But the spontaneous and personal nature of much of that communication lends itself perfectly to the mobile phone.

AOL's Bebo social-networking site will gain features for lifestreaming, an increasingly popular type of online service that lets people broadcast frequent, brief updates about their lives through photos, videos, blog items, comments and other content.

Lifestreaming posts are often compiled from a variety of other social networks and social media sites and formatted in a chronological, timeline-like interface.

Back in November, people-search sites Reunion.com and Wink announced that they would be merging, and now it's happened: the sites have rebranded as MyLife, which can search over 60 social-networking sites (over 750 million profiles, the company says) and other information resources on the Web.

Among those social networks it can search are MySpace, Facebook (well, the public profile listings thereof), LinkedIn, Friendster, AOL's Bebo, Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces, Yahoo, and Twitter. New features include a Facebook-like news feed of contacts' activity aggregated across multiple social networks, and a "search scout" feature that keeps you updated on changes to past search results.

'Our community has been asking for this feature since we launched imeem Mobile last fall,' said Dalton Caldwell, founder and CEO of imeem. 'We're happy to give them what they want ' access to their music from the cloud'and to help drive download sales by adding more value to the music people buy online. That's good for music fans, for the industry and for imeem.'

The new version of imeem Mobile includes additional new features that make it easier for people to access and share their favorite music on the go

Synchronica, the leading developer of mobile email and synchronization solutions, today announces new functionality within Mobile Gateway 4.0 that pushes social networking and news updates to any mass market mobile phone.

A wide range of popular social networking sites, such as Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, LinkedIn and Plaxo are supported in addition to thousands of other leading news, financial, and sporting feeds.

Updates are automatically pushed to the user’s mobile phone whenever new content is made available. The integration is based on Mobile Gateway’s standard JCR-compliant plugin architecture which connects to any site that supports RSS feeds.

Om Malik, Business Week: "A clue to the future comes courtesy of a new Web- and mobile-based recommendation service from New York-based startup, Goodrec . It allows me to recommend books, restaurants, or places, then shares them with my friends on Facebook. The service aggregates the recommendations from my social network and puts them to use when I need some help making decisions. When looking for a restaurant recommendation in say, Dallas, I can pull up recommendations from my friends on my iPhone.

Mobile social networking grew by 152% between November 2007 and November 2008 in Western Europe, according to ComScore. The figures show that in November 34% of mobile social network users in Western Europe accessed social media exclusive of all other mobile web content. The UK has the highest penetration of mobile social networking at 9%, nearly triple that of Germany, where the activity is the least popular at 3.3% penetration. The average penetration rate across...

Other labels, like Texas Instruments, reported plans to reorganize investments that more prominently prioritize mobile social networking. French mobile carrier Orange — which partnered with Apple for the iPhone — incorporates unlimited access to Facebook and MySpace in special pricing packages. (Other data use is metered.) Movidia — which has $14 million in venture capital at its disposal — recently built a processor that enables users to conduct sophisticated video post-production via mobile.