• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, September 13, 2011

Status updates, photos, email -- what else would mobile users be doing on their social networks? Checking one another out, of course. But one of the more interesting stats from the Prosper mobile insight study of mobile social behaviors is the allure of photo sharing.

Tracking its panel of 294 smartphone and tablet owners, Prosper finds 69.4% are reading status updates on their networks, 53.4% are updating their own status. But 65.6% are viewing photos and 49% are posting photos.

The ubiquity of social platforms on mobile is clear; only 15% saying they don't access social media sites on their phones. In fact, the survey answers were provided via the panel's mobile devices, Prosper says.

More intriguing than the sociability of social networkers is the panel's wish list of for a better mobile social experience.

Respondents voiced desires for more power to group their friends and limited access in sub-groups. They wanted to see all of their friends on the network and wanted more content like video conferencing, deals from local check-ins and local entertainment directories integrated into the experience.

Among these panelists, no one has a lock on social networks, since only 18.2% said they were unlikely to switch to another one. But 42.5% said they were likely to move to a better one if available. This might be good news for Google and its Google+ initiative.

The survey finds an astonishing 50.7% of smartphone and tablet owners saying they already have Google+ accounts, which may say more about the social skew of the sample. Despite that high number, more than half of those admit they don't use it often.