Matthaus Krzykowski has posted an article on Venturebeat about the current trends of mobile social networks and discussing who will end up being the leaders in the space. Currently Facebook and Myspace are the dominant mobile social networks but many are wondering if any of the mobile-only social networks will give the already dominant players a run for their money.

Matthaus points out the mobile only social network Mocospace who has over 1 billion views worldwide so far. This is in contrast to Myspace mobile who had 1.4 billion page views last month alone. Myspace is currently the most dominant mobile social network according to a report out by Nielsen yesterday. Facebook has also experienced explosive growth through the iPhone version of the site as well as the Blackberry application.

There is also a whole suite of existing social networks which are only for mobile and you probably haven’t heard of (I know I definitely haven’t). This includes AirG, Jumbuck, Buzzcity, MyGamma, Bluepulse and Zannel. This space has a ton of diversity and still a massive amount of growth left. I would argue that this space will be growing faster than the web based social networking sites over the next few years.

Currently there are physical limitations to how robust the social networks can get but as this space transforms it will be extremely exciting. Are there any mobile social networks that you use? What do you think are the best ones so far?

Late last year an iPhone version of Facebook was launched and received a ton of positive user feedback. Jake Marsh just released a video of MySpace for the iPhone. The applications looks amazing but the one thing that I don’t understand is how Jake plans on accessing a user’s inbox. Additionally, according to the demo displayed below you can access band music from the application. I’m not quite sure how this works because the songs aren’t technically accessible via the API and the URLs are not accessible via the page source code.

Jake now has over 12,000 Twitter followers thanks to this video becoming a hit on Digg. Jake Marsh decided to create his own API for MySpace using screen scraping. If this application is for real, Jake will more than likely have his app acquired since he is doing most of the work for MySpace. There are a lot of great features and it’s a duplicate of the iPhone application developed by Facebook. This is highly impressive and it would be great if other platforms produced something similar.

I think the real breakthrough will come when each of these platforms begin to offer mobile platforms in which applications can run. While Facebook already offers a mobile platform it is highly limited. I have a feeling that we will see a lot more applications developed for mobile as the standards for mobile applications become much simpler and phone begin to offer better interfaces for users to interact with.

Today is mobile friday (I wanted it to be mobile monday but what can I do?). According to their press release, Verizon Wireless customers can now access MySpace Mobile on all Mobile Web 2.0-enabled phones. I’m not quite sure what Mobile Web 2.0-enabled phones are but apparently it is a Verizon service. The new service enables customers to access:

• Message Management - Just as it is called, users can read their messages as well as send in reply with all their friends as well as respond to friend requests. This is greater then the services currently provided by Facebook’s Blackberry application.
• View Photo Albums - You can browse through your albums on your phone. There was no comment on whether or not you can view your friends pictures.
• Viewing Friends - Just like on the standard version of MySpace, users can browse through all of their friends’ profiles from their verizon handled device.
• Friend Search - Not only can you browse through your friends’ profiles but you can also search for others. So if you want to spend time looking at random peoples’ profiles on your phone, now you can!
• Comments & Blog Postings - Just as you can do on your PC, you can post comments and update blogs. Also, “any new information entered will be posted to a member’s mobile and online MySpace profile simultaneously.”

From my recollection, this service is a premium service and users need to pay a monthly fee to access MySpace. It is most likely combined with their “Mobile Web 2.0″ service which, has a pretty horrible name. This news highlights the rapid growth of the mobile space for social networking. 2008 is going to most definitely see continued growth in the mobile space. Are you a “Mobile Web 2.0″ subscriber?

When I began writing this post I had the same attitude I always have on location based social networks: what’s the point? Well I went and checked out the mobile social network, Loopt, after reading about their new partnership with Verizon and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed.

Initially I figured location tracking services would be only useful for parents that want to keep track of their childrens’ activities. Loopt on the other hand enables you to mash together text messages with location. This is really useful for close friends because rather than texting somebody, you could simply walk on over and say “Hello!” For now Twitter has worked sufficiently for knowing what my friends are up to but perhaps my voyeuristic needs will grow over time.

While I think automatically being updated of my friends locations is weird on its own, combining location with messaging makes a lot of sense. If I was on a camping trip and lost in the woods, it would be helpful to see my location relative to my friends. Then again if I knew my location, I wouldn’t be lost! As we make the transition from desktops to mobile, I have a feeling that we will see in an increase in location based offerings. Do you think location based services are useful? Would you use them?

For the past few years, the U.S. has been light years behind the rest of the world when it comes to mobile phones and applications. It looks like things are beginning to perk up with the support of three web industry leaders: Google, Apple and Adobe. Today there have been two news stories that illustrate the mobile tipping point domestically. The first is a report is a statement out of Google today which states that we have “hit a watershed moment in terms of internet usage.”

The growth is being fueled by the expansion of unlimited data plans by mobile carriers as well as the launch of the iPhone which Google previously reported as driving a surge in traffic to their various internet properties. While Google’s statement may have been part of a new product launch which “conveniently positions a Google Web search window on the home screen” of Windows Mobile devices, a second announcement fueled the mobile related buzz.

According to Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, there will soon be a version of Flash for the iPhone. This is a massive revelation and will surely transform the future of mobile development. For too long it has been overly complex to develop robust applications for mobile devices, but with the launch of a flash support for the iPhone could immediately simply development a start a mobile revolution.

If you think about it, one of the greatest successes of Twitter has been the ability to easily communicate while on the go. You can view what your friends are talking about and participate in live conversation all from the comfort of your mobile phone. For those with little time, sites like Facebook and MySpace can be too time consuming to become involved on a regular basis. That’s why social networks are going to rapidly become more mobile.

Browse through Facebook and you’ll rapidly begin to notice that it resembles a phone book in the way that you can search through your “friends” and view all of their contact information. In a session at the GSMA Mobile World Conference, RIM’s co-CEO stated that social networking is the future of the company. He stated that social networking will soon become as pervasive within enterprises as instant messaging already is.

Mobile companies will need to either become “pipes or platforms.” As I wrote earlier this morning, Zynga has already launched a platform. It appears that the concept of building platforms that any developer can build on has extended beyond social networks and has moved into social networks and will soon enter mobile. So far the best mobile social network tool that I’ve used is Facebook for Blackberry.

There is a whole new wave of services being offered for mobile and soon enough we’ll begin seeing new mobile services appear at the same pace that new “Web 2.0″ sites have been sprouting up over the past couple years. Have you used any highly engaging mobile social networks?

We have all heard about internet dating and finding true love via a social network. Well Karen over at Cordarouns.com is about it hit the streets of San Fransisco looking for her true love.

Karen has enlisted a myriad of social tools to help her on her quest ranging from Facebook and the others to the video/picture/text streaming service Zannel. Karen is going to hit the streets in an 8 hour frenzy to find her man.

Karen, who happens to be way cute, will start the day with a police sketch of her perfect man. She will then hit the streets and use followers input to help her make a V-Day date choice. I think the idea is fresh and fun and I am going to follow it.

Don’t get me wrong, I know this is a marketing ploy but I love it. These are the types of fun social media events and tools that ALL marketers should be looking into. This is the Budweiser Super Bowl Commercial of the web 2.0 age.

Look I am stuck at my desk maybe 3 to 4 hours a day, I have a rough job, but many people spend 8+ plus hours in their cube with nothing to do but work (how much of that can you do?). Karen’s experiment will let them watch something fun, funny and let marketers get some product placement while it happens.

I say good show to all parties involved. Karen and Cordarounds, way to think out of the box. Zannel, good job with highlighting your service in a fun way. Social networks, well you guys don’t need any more praise you created a platform for all of this to happen on.

To bad Karen isn’t doing this in DC, I know plenty of single guys who would love to meet her. Is anyone else out there going to be following Karen? Do any of you out there know of any more fun, online social events like this that you could tell me about? If so let me know.

Follow Karen at Zannel.

Thanks to Alec Saunders who points out a press release posted on the Cellular-News website. The press release states that mobile social networks will account for $52 billion in revenue by 2012 given the high growth scenario. How did they come up with these numbers? Well if you take 30-50% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) multiply that by seventeen divide by twelve, throw that number into the mobile social network growth calculation formula you will end up with a bazillion dollars.

Well maybe not a bazillion but you get the idea. According to the post, mobile social networking has reached critical mass and Japan is poised to explode in the U.S. This will be a follow-up to the attack of the killer bees that will begin by killing off most of Texas sometime later this year. Toward the end of the press release it is stated that much of the growth will be dependent on mobile network operator policies.

There is no doubt that mobile social networks will be big in the coming years but the amount of money to be generated by them is still questionable. Not even web based social networks have come up with effective revenue models. MySpace, the largest social network on the web, made less than one billion dollars last year. Facebook brought in approximately $150 million in revenue last year and is expected to reach over $325 million by the end of this year. So how did they come up with $52 billion from mobile social networks?

Rafe Needleman of Cnet is reporting that Yahoo is taking a jump in to streaming social video. The service is called Yahoo Live and sadly it is down at the moment. Rafe mentions in his post that the service faltered after 800 users signed on.

I have heard that Yahoo is going through some staffing problems right now but last time I checked Yahoo has a MASSIVE user base, myself included, and should have expected a flood of traffic. All that being said I am actually pretty excited about this development.

In the past couple of days I have been experimenting with services like Comvu and CommetNow to find a way to stream video from my phone to a website. I have a windows smartphone and I have been trying to find a way to remove latency from what I see and do, to what I can post.

Rafe says the Yahoo Live will have an open API to encourage users to ‘Mashup’ the Live product. I am a HUGE Yahoo fan and I hope this service takes off. The Live function will also have a chat function which could be fun. My dream is to have the Yahoo Live service go mobile somehow and let me stream right from my Motorola Q to a blog post.

I see it happening something like this: I am attending a networking event. I see that a good speaker is about to take the podium. I twitter to all my contacts that I am about to stream. I pull out my Q and begin to live stream to an embedded clip on one of my blogs. Hello world this is how social media should happen.

I know other services out there offer a ’similar’ service but none of them are perfect. I need to be able to do all of the streaming media things, without my laptop, and it need to be free. Sure I have an evdo connection for my laptop, but I don’t want to have to lug my laptop everywhere and who really knows when I will need to stream video.

Is anyone else out there excited that Yahoo is making the jump into the streaming media family? I see great potential in this field for bloggers and journalist and would like to see someone with the resources to make it happen take up the cause. I guess my final plea is that Yahoo gets this service back up and running so I can play start working with it.

Caroline McCarthy does a wonderful job detailing the overall trend at tonight’s New York Advertising Meetup at Googleplex East: “Old media’s not dead, it just has to be Google-ized.” Over the course of an hour, Google executives from radio, print, search and agency relations discussed (read: pitched) their online and offline products to the Madison Avenue audience.

Granted the event was hosted on their turf, Google did have a right to pitch their products and talk up why a YouTube campaign may return the greatest ROI of all online initiatives. Sure, there were some blanketing statements like the one I just listed, but I couldn’t help think about spaces outside the dominant Google; of things that Google has yet to touch.

What about mobile? Yes, Google makes great mobile applications like Maps, Search and Reader but what about advertising? “None of us know what the [mobile] monetization models could be,” Derek Kuhl, Head of Agency Relations, admitted. In the US, search is king, expected to hit $1.4 billion in revenue by 2012 although three in ten mobile users recall seeing mobile advertising. Ouch.

Above: A pamphlet with a QR Code in the Google logo. Text reads, “Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. - Gore Vidal. ‘I hope it is the same half!’ Print Ads TGIAF at Hemisphere (Google’s NYC cafeteria) 1/31/08″

In the most subtlest of ways, Google introduced a comprehensive (what marketer’s like to call, “integrated”) mobile advertising initiative via a soon-to-be-announced product for Newspaper Print Ads: QR Codes. Already available and widely popular/useful in Japan, QR Codes will work in tandem with Google’s offline advertisements in newspapers. (Wait, I thought print was tanking?) Similar to a bar code on a cereal box, QR Codes are compact enough to store valuable information (think a website address or coupon). For Google, this means taking a text ad that was placed in print, utilize the corresponding QR Code and draw the reader to another destination.

This may seem menial in comparison to Android efforts, but Google’s foray (at least in the US) into mobile advertising via QR Codes changes the dynamic completely. As the sales and engineering teams test the product internally, expect the industry to steadily roll-out awareness programs and updated software for leading smartphones and the iPhone.

P.S. I also asked Kuhl if he or any other panel speakers had any update about Twitter-competitor Jaiku and (I guess) the answer was expected: “I don’t have any updates except that we acquired it.”

Update: Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider points to Google’s Print Ads barcode information website.