VICTORIANS will be able to warn each other of bushfire threats with a new mobile phone system that pinpoints their exact location.
The Australian developers of Pocket Life say that if the mobile social networking system had been used on Black Saturday victims might have received an early warning of the approaching firestorms.

Just released new reports on the top mobile social networks in Japan - Mobagetown, GREE and Mixi. The reports are available for $3,000 each for a company license; Infinita also distribute them as a bundle for US$ 6,750. More info here http://infinita.co.jp/en/research/mega_bundle.html

Mobile social networking is a trend that is growing at an incredible rate; it could soon overtake the need to access a computer for all social networking activities. Social networking companies, like Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace, have partnered together with mobile phone carriers and mobile phone manufacturers to ensure that their communities not only featured prominently within the web start pages but that their mobile applications function correctly on all internet-ready mobile phones. This is allowing people to be in constant contact with their online social communities.

Two weeks ago, Facebook submitted its completely redesigned iPhone application to Apple. Today it was released live in the App Store.

As you may or may not already know, mobile Facebook users, as well as those using geo-location networks such as FourSquare and Loopt, are paving the way for the future of Social Networking.

According to Facebook statistics:

- There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.

- People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.

Those numbers are profound indeed.

However, Facebook 3.0 doesn’t represent just another iteration of its already popular mobile app. 3.0 represents the evolution of mobile social networking and a tangible glimpse of the future of personal and professional communications and also the distribution and consumption of media.

Are you constantly on the move and don't have time to log on to your computer to be in touch with your friends? Coming to your rescue now is your mobile phone through which you can access any social networking site, anytime, anywhere.

Take college student Ajay Kumar for instance.

On a holiday in Goa, Mr. Kumar was constantly glued to his mobile phone -- not calling or texting but scrapping and walling his friends on their profiles on Facebook and Orkut.

"I like to remain in constant touch with my friends. I like to be updated on what is going on in their lives even when I am not in town," Mr. Kumar told IANS.

For many youngsters like Mr. Kumar, the key to stay in touch with their friends is now to remain hooked to mobile social networking.

Corporate executive at a multinational company Pranav Sharma echoed: "I am often out on business trips and it is difficult for me to be in touch with my friends. Therefore, I log on to the Internet on my mobile phone and go to the social networking sites to know what my friends are up to".

Amidst the talk of competing social networking platforms, one provider's taking a different approach to creating iPhon gaming on communities.

US company Geocade, which is installed in top 10 games such as Paper Toss and Ragdoll Blaster, enables you to create leaderboards based on the physical location of players.

We caught up with founder Jim Caralis - based in Cambridge, MA by the way - to find out more.

Facebook is experimenting with letting users bill their cell phones to buy Facebook Credits for virtual goods.

The social network is teaming with mobile payment company Zong to provide this service, and the credits can be used to purchase virtual goods within Facebook. These credits are normally purchased with credit cards, and they can also be used within Facebook applications to do things like buy extra weapons in games.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman is a senior fellow and director of the Social Computing Lab (SCL) for Hewlett-Packard, which is conducting research into the explosive phenomenon of social networks, and the human interaction with them. That research is being used to produce services and applications for the mobile sector to help users deal with the glut of information that social networks provide in vast quantities. The lab has produced one application for the BlackBerry platform, and another is under development for multiple mobile platforms.

I recently sat down with Huberman, a speaker at our upcoming conference, Mobilize 09, to discuss this research and the products derived for the mobile sector. We talked about how mobile users deal with the massive social networks (Twitter, MySpace and Facebook) and how special technology can leverage it to best effect. An edited version of our conversation is below.

These new reports on the top mobile social networking services in Japan, which I think may be of interest to people/organizations in your network. Without a doubt, all three - mobagetown, GREE and mixi – are doing some incredibly cool things in terms of service design, strategy and business models that are highly relevant to social networking plays, advertisers/brands, agencies, carriers and mobile games studios/publishers trying to figure out the SNS equation on mobile anywhere.

Nokia has just rolled out a new touchscreen handset - The Nokia 5230. Don’t get confused with the Nokia 5230 XpressMusic, the 5230 is completely a different phone. The phone has officially announced by the Finnish company today, in India. The Nokia 5230 is a social networking friendly phone that in affordable price and running on Series 60 Fifth Edition platform.

3 have always innovated; as evidenced by having their slogan ‘changing mobile forever’ as their lead message. It is this that saw them forge into the social networking space in partnership with INQ around this time last year, a move that was well received. However, both Orange and Vodafone are, as UKGadgeteer reports, “preparing some social networking software to improve their customer experience…”

Orange has ‘Social Life’ (which you can read about courtesy of Mobile Europe) that will aggregate activity from Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. It will be accessible through the operator’s portal, Orange World.

The third player in this battle is Vodafone with ‘Vodafone People’. TechCrunch covered this with insider videos, which have since been removed, but there is still plenty to get your teeth into, “Vodafone is now aiming squarely at integrating social networks, an area which the 3 network has pushed heavily to date. Vodafone People has ‘active contacts’, similar to the old Jaiku format and seems to be taking on INQ Mobile by syncing contacts on multiple devices and details with Facebook. In other words, Vodafone appears spooked by Three’s focus on social networking.”

Please don’t shout treason. This OneApp concept form Microsoft sounds and looks very very interesting. Microsoft must be using South Africa as a test bed for innovation and to hose down competition as its mobile services get a new lease of life.

Perhaps because App stores are bigger than Star Wars and the Jedi are looking for a new hero to triumph? Using South Africa and the spectacularly emerging mobile African market for a back drop to innovation could be a chillingly good strategy from Microsoft.

What is OneApp?
Microsoft OneApp is a new software application designed for feature phones – the phones most commonly found in emerging markets. Many phones in the market today are limited in the features they can deliver; OneApp expands the capabilities of these handsets to deliver new apps and services as well as a great mobile experience.

Orange today announced the launch of Social Life, a mobile social networking aggregator which brings together activity on Facebook, MySpace and Bebo in one central place. Accessible from Orange World, Orange’s mobile internet portal, Social Life allows customers to view and post updates and get in touch with friends and family across all three social networks at the same time through a single log-in.

Available to all Orange mobile customers, the Social Life home screen allows users to:

* upload photos
* update their status
* keep track of friends’ status updates from all three leading social networks
* view social network notifications, including messages, events, pokes and friend requests
* send and receive messages

With 800 million people worldwide set to participate in social networks by phone in 2012 (according to eMarketer 2008), and 67% of the 132 million of Facebook users and 70% of 117 million of Myspace.com users (ABI Research 2008) having used a mobile device to access these social networks, the dawn of the mobile revolution is upon the world and there is no way of stopping it!
“Social network creates awareness, assists with information search and contributes with alternative valuation, Llew Claasen, Clickatell VP for online marketing and products, said at the Thinking Mobile conference held late last week at the IDC headquarters in Sandton, Johannesburg, calling on organisations to be part of the social network system.

Qeep, a mobile based social network has announced an advertising partnership with ZestADZ. Qeep currently owns and develops mobile based app for its network. The mobi social network currently has 2 million users with 25 per cent Q-o-Q growth.

The partnership would allow ZestADZ to promote its Ad brands across various segments on Qeep’s mobile app. The 2 Million user strength and 40 million impressions per month would be a positive for the advertising network.

Herman Heunis isn't your typical social-media startup founder. He's 50 years old, was raised on a sheep farm in Namibia, and is a veteran of the South African Navy. Little surprise that the company he built is no garden-variety social network either.

The company is called MXit Lifestyle and offers a range of mobile social networking tools, including instant messaging and music downloads. Since its launch in 2005, MXit has attracted more than 14 million users across the developing world, from Buenos Aires to Beijing, and it's adding 25,000 users a day. Initially funded by Heunis alone, the company broke even in its second year of operation.

Facebook has launched a new service aimed at mobiles and narrowband connections.

Facebook Lite has debuted. It’s a new service from the social networking site, aimed at mobile connections and also those who only have narrowband connections.

It’s currently being trialed in India, and it’s believed it will be extended to China and Russia. Around three-quarters of the site’s 250 million users are in countries with broadband connections, other countries have limited broadband infrastructure, so mobiles have become dominant.

Facebook claims that the new service will be a "faster, simpler version similar to the Facebook experience you get on a mobile phone."

"Facebook Lite is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept friend requests, write on people's walls, and look at photos and status updates."

"We are currently testing Facebook Lite in countries where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience."

A slimmed-down Facebook will give the site potentially a much larger presence all around the globe as it continues its march to world domination.

Nimbuzz, a popular social networking app for iPhone, Windows Mobile and S60, has wriggling its way onto the Android Market. Skype, Facebook, GTalk, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger and more are all available through Nimbuzz. A particularly unique feature is location support – allowing to share your where with friends online. On top of that, additional support is available for regional social networks which would probably never get the opportunity to go mobile.

Mosio is a mobile question and answer community enabling you to text any question from your phone and have it answered by real people. Harnessing the power of helpful people, mobile technologies and the internet, Mosio gives users access to information anywhere.

Launched in August, 2007, Mosio is privately funded and headquartered in San Francisco, CA.

Currently, regular cameras still take better pictures than our cell phones, but having to wait to get to a computer to share those crisp images with family and friends can be frustrating. Samsung's latest release gives the point and shoot camera the instant internet access mobile phones have been lording over them for years.