Online social networking may be the hottest thing on the Web, and soon it may turn out to be the hottest thing on the phone. According to new research released by Informa Telecoms
& Media, as many as 60 million mobile phone subscribers currently access social media services ranging from simple chat rooms to sophisticated multimedia environments, and the numbers is growing fast.
So fast, that Informa projects it could rise sevenfold by 2012. Among the benefits of mobile social networking, says Informa’s Christine Perey, is that it offers more privacy for users to
access than using an office computer.
Some big players are already eyeing the space with an eye, er ear, toward being the Facebook, or Myspace of
mobile. One of them is Nokia, the Finnish mobile technology firm that has been diversifying aggressively from hardware to a services business, especially the kind supported by advertising. Not
surprisingly, Nokia is jumping into mobile social networking, and has already launched the Mosh social community, and the N-Gage gaming service. “Share on Ovi,†a media sharing site,
launches this week.