• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, December 21, 2009

A recent study by Strategy Analytics found Google and Facebook to be the most desired brands to have on a mobile phone. Not a big surprise, given the companies' respective dominance in search and social networking on the desktop Web, which is quickly extending to mobile.

More unexpected is that Twitter would ran 16th out of 24 brands in the U.S. despite its mobile-centric format and the reams of publicity the microblogging service has generated. Ahead of it were more established brands including Yahoo, Weather.com, iTunes and MySpace, according to the research firm's survey of 439 mobile users in the U.S. and the UK.

The latest data from comScore also shows Twitter's audience growth continued its holding pattern of recent months, adding only 100,000 new U.S. unique visitors for a total of 19.4 million in November. Twitter's international growth has also flattened, at 58.3 million visitors as of October.

TechCrunch, pointed out, however, that popular Twitter applications like Seesmic and Tweetdeck are still enjoying strong growth as more people to turn to these and similar programs to manage their Twitter accounts. The comScore figures also don't reflect mobile usage. Even so, Twitter doesn't appear to be a threat to Facebook becoming as powerful a social networking force on mobile as on the PC.

Morgan Stanley's recently released Mobile Internet Report cited Facebook and Apple as leading innovation in mobile communications and commerce. But it views mobile social networking as a rising tide lifting all boats rather than a zero sum game between Facebook and Twitter. "Like Twitter, Facebook is evolving to provide complete communication to its users, from emails and posts to online chats, voice and video," states the report.

So while Twitter may not live up to the hype that's surrounded the service since early on, it doesn't mean it will swept away by Facebook's mobile expansion either.