Now the app joins a handful of others (really, just a handful) on the new Palm Pre. But before you go and download this one, there's something you need to consider about LikeMe: their reviews may be compromised.

LikeMe on Pre

It's a shame, to be sure, that the quality of this app's content still remains under question as they launch their latest offering on the Pre, a device that certainly needs as many apps as it can get. The LikeMe app even has some great features that take advantage of exclusive Pre functionality, like the ability to send recommendations via MMS straight from the app to friends in your phone's contact list.

The webOS application also uses Pre's GPS service to identify nearby places that have been recommended by your friends and people like you. You can use the GPS feature to share your location with friends, too, turning LikeMe into a combo of a Yelp-like service and a mobile social network of sorts.

Six Months Later, the Questionable "Reviews" Remain

Unfortunately, the accusations about the reviews (or perhaps we should call them "ads") comprise the integrity of the site and make us question the quality of its content. Although we're sure nearly all review sites that rely on user ratings have some outside manipulation going on thanks to business owners who want to counter negative reviews, in this case the manipulation is more of an inside job. And the reviews that were called out in January as being suspect are still on the site today, so obviously the company either thinks they've done nothing wrong or they don't think anyone will know.

Given the small number of apps available for Pre, LikeMe has an opportunity to gain a foothold there due to a lack of competition. Perhaps that's really why they decided to launch exclusively on the Pre - not because of "its ability to multitask and unique points of integration," as their press release says.

But at this point, we think maybe Pre users would be better off opting for the mobile Yelp site instead.

UPDATE: Response from LikeMe:

"Here's the deal...in the beginning we used friends and family to start populating the community. That included VVM personnel and some people from the ad side.

With today's current crop of social networking applications like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, the decisions about who you "friend" are made consciously, based on a number of criteria unique to the individual. Often, these networks become crowded with people who you barely know, but find interesting. That's a social network, yes, but it's not one that reflects your real-life relationships. Even Facebook, the current social darling, has moved away from being about real-life friendships. With the ability to friend public figures and brands and the ability to sort friends into lists, the push is on to expand your network beyond close, personal connections.

Similar issues face the mobile social networks emerging now. Applications like Loopt and Brightkite still require you to add friends which leads to, again, networks that consist of acquaintances and other folks you only know marginally well.

How Friendlee is Different

Because there really isn't a network that taps into your real world relationships, the HP researchers decided to build one. In Friendlee, the social graph is automatically constructed with minimal input required from the user since the software tracks the call and messaging history to determine your connections.

In addition, Friendlee introduces a set of "ambient awareness" indicators that provide useful information about your friends' statuses. For example, indicators will include current location, time spent at that location, local time, weather, a status message, and even your friend's phone's status: busy, phone on hold, engaged, silent, or vibrate. Imagine how useful it would be to know if your friend's phone was busy or turned to silent before you even dialed it!

Friendlee isn't just a contacts-replacement application, though. It is a network. The app actually lets you see your immediate contacts, of course, but it lets you see your friends' contacts as well. These lists are sorted by the strength of the connections, something that's determined by the frequency and duration of the interactions.

Because not everyone would be comfortable sharing their contact information with a social network, intimate or not, Friendlee includes privacy controls that let you configure who gets to see what. That way, you could configure anyone in the "Family" category to see everything, but other groups would have access to less information.

Friendlee consists of three components: the phone-based client, a web interface where you can interact with the data, and a backend server that stores a copy of all the information in a database. The client would sync with the server several times per minute, updating the system with call history, location, time, and other information.

Still a Prototype Only (Boo!)

At the moment, Friendlee is in prototype form for both the Android and Windows Mobile operating systems, so you can only drool over it now. The prototypes will be put into field testing while improvements are made before it ever becomes publicly available.

We normally wouldn't post about an application which you can't even try out yet (we hate to tease!), but this one sounded downright revolutionary. We were just too excited not to share the news with you.

Note: we requested more information about Friendlee's public availability but have not heard back yet from HP.

With regards to the economy, a number of sectors, including retail, and the auto and financial services industries, have obviously made dramatic cuts to their online spending. On the other hand, the pharmaceutical industry is actually spending more on online ads today.

According to Nielsen, the current trend towards watching more online video should drive more advertisers towards this medium, while for social media, according to Nielsen, "a monetization formula continues to elude the globe's brightest marketers." Nielsen, however, is also very positive about how Twitter and other social networks have broken down the feedback barriers between brands and consumers.

Looking at the current buzz around social networks, Nielsen found that MySpace now trails Facebook and Twitter, and conversations around Twitter even surpassed Facebook in March.

The number of new social media users is actually dwarfed by these numbers for online video, but according to Nielsen Online, there are now 87% more social media users than in 2003, and they devote 883% more time to these sites.

Nielsen also found that the number of users who are accessing social networks through mobile devices tripled during 2008 which is a trend that the new MySpace CEO will surely try to exploit to gain back some momentum on the social networking market.

Focus: New Mothers Love Social Media

According to Nielsen, new mothers exhibit a couple of interesting traits. More than any other group, including experienced mothers, new moms are drawn to social networking sites and blogs, and they are also more likely to publish their own blog posts.

In this context, Nielsen also took a closer look at the "Motrin Moms" phenomenon we described last November. Motrin's ads, which many mothers considered to be condescending, quickly changed how consumers described the brand. After the ads appeared, Motrin was suddenly closely related with Twitter, blogging, and moms, but also with negative terms like 'backlash' and 'offensive.'

Citysense isn't the only such app doing this, there are currently a lot of location-based social networking plays. They include "social compass" service Loopt (our review), Nokia-owned Plazes (our review), Pelago's Whrrl, ULocate, and GyPSii. Probably our favorite right now is mobile social network app Brightkite, which at the end of last year we named our Most Promising startup for 2009. All of these apps offer something unique. For example Brightkite relies on actions from its user base to make it useful, whereas Citysense's strength is its 4 million sensors and the aggregate data it derives and analyzes from those.

Sense Networks was the subject of a recent review by MIT's Technology Review publication, which described how the next release of Citysense will show "not only where people are gathering in real time, but where people with similar behavioral patterns - students, tourists, or businesspeople, for instance - are congregating." So we can see that Citysense is slowly evolving into a social networking tool, like Brightkite. In the next release Citysense will categorize people into "tribes" - so far 20 tribes have been identified, including "young and edgy," "business traveler," "weekend mole," and "homebody." In order to do this, Sense Networks not only uses GPS data, but company address data and demographic data about people from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The company's monetization plans are predictably centered around location-based mobile advertising. This involves providing GPS data about city activity to advertisers, however the company insists that it will be aggregate data only - so user privacy is maintained. The user also can turn off the tracking and delete their existing data. An example of how advertising could work, via Technology Review, is data showing that "a particular demographic heads to bars downtown between 6 and 9 P.M. on weekdays. Advertisers could then tailor ads on a billboard screen to that specific crowd."

We think this is a good example of how sensors and mobile data are being used to provide real value to consumers. Let us know other examples you've come across lately.

MySpace also announced that LG will preload the MySpace Mobile application on the next-generation of its Windows Mobile 6.1 phones.

The Future of MySpace is Mobile

MySpace, according to its own data, currently has about 20 million worldwide mobile users, and it offers mobile applications for all the major smart phone platforms, including the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia, Palm, and Windows Mobile.

We know that MySpace, which has recently been overtaken by Facebook as the leading social networking site in the U.S., considers mobile social networking applications to be the next battleground, and this is definitely one of the reasons why the company is trying to get a foothold on all the major mobile platforms now. Whether this will be enough to hold back Facebook's current march towards dominating the social networking space remains to be seen, however.

By default, Twe2 will send you an SMS whenever you receive a direct message or a reply. In order to finance this service, Twe2 appends a short ad to all of its SMS messages.

Twe2, whose developers are also responsible for the popular FriendDeck app, has added a number of interesting features to its service that Twitter itself never offered. You can, for example, use the service to receive a message whenever a certain keyword appears in your stream, and you can even use relatively complex search queries.

In order to keep your Twitter SMS stream manageable, Twe2 lets you set the notification frequency (up to 100 messages per hour), and you can also specify if you only want Twe2 to send you messages at specific times during the day or only on certain days of the week.

Thanks to these features, Twe2 is even an interesting service for those of us who live in countries where Twitter's own SMS service is still available. Twe2 also promises that users in the U.S. will get a few extra features in order to distinguish the service from Twitter's own SMS updates.

One problem with Twe2, however, is that the service doesn't have access to Twitter's firehose feed, so that it can often take a while before it notices a new message and forwards it to you.

OAuth Coming Soon

Twe2 was approved by Twitter to test the company's forthcoming support oAuth, though this is not available yet. For now, you still have to provide Twe2 with your Twitter login and password.

Find Us on Twitter

If you'd like to befriend the ReadWriteWeb staff on Twitter here are our accounts - we'd love to meet you too!

With the rise of smartphone-based computing, applications like Brightkite, Loopt, and others were slowly growing their user base, letting friends share posts, photos, and other information with each other as they moved from place to place out in the real world. Accessed via mobile applications or SMS, these sorts of networks provided the framework for connecting people to the places they visit.

However, it was too soon to determine whether mobile social networking was a space that would ever really take off. As studies showed, the social networks that most people accessed on the go were not specialized "mobile" networks, but the usual ones - Facebook and MySpace. Having to recreate a friend graph on new mobile social networks was not something everyone was up for...at least it hadn't been not so far.

Without any easy way to import MySpace and Facebook friends to these newer mobile networks (like via Facebook Connect for example), our mobile social networks were filled only with an odd mix of friends: some early adopters and maybe a handful of tech-obsessed locals. But that being said, the networks still had potential assuming they could have ever gotten over the initial hump to gather critical mass. They were offering something unique, and that boded well for them. Being able to tune into the world around you and see who was there, who had been there, and what was going on was a type of augmented reality that was never possible before the advent of modern mobile computing.

Google's Potential to Dominate

Now that Google has come onto the scene, friend graphs already intact, one has to wonder about the impact this will have on these smaller networks. How will they survive? Google is already a mainstream service and Latitude was just covered by the Wall Street Journal. Needless to say, any mainstream users out there intrigued by mobile social networking will now just go try Google's service.

Yet where the smaller networks had the cozy feel of you and handful of friends, any service maintained by a behemoth such as Google immediately has a "Big Brother" feel to it. No matter how many opt-out features and privacy controls they offer, some people just won't be able to shake that feeling that Google is just a little too omnipresent in our lives. But will "fear of Google" alone be enough to keep people from leaving the small mobile networks in favor of the larger one?

According to Martin May, Brightkite founder, though, Google didn't even come close to killing his service. "With Brightkite," he says, "we are primarily focused making meaningful connections with people you didn't necessarily know yet, around places. Latitude seems focused on showing you where your existing friends are at. Functionality-wise, Latitude does very little beyond sharing a latitude, longitude and accuracy with friends at the moment." But even May admits that may change down the road.

Wait...Our Real Friends Aren't on Google

What's strange about the mobile social networking market, though, are the missing players. The major missing players. Where is Facebook? Where is MySpace? Why is it that the biggest social networks on the planet have decidedly shunned any attempt to add proximity and mapping to their mobile services?

If anything our real friends are here, not on Google, whose friend network includes random people from our Gmail accounts, interesting folks from our RSS readers, and the occasional visitors to our blogs (thanks to the Google Friend Connect widget). Those may be people who we work with, people who wanted to share feeds with us, or fellow bloggers, but they aren't necessarily our real-life friends. And since they're not, why on earth would we want to share our locations with them?

The ability to connect to all our real-life, real-world friends and family - friends that include mainstream web users, mom, dad, and the kids - is something that just isn't here yet. No matter which mobile social network you end up using, including Google's, you're only going to see a slice of your actual social network. A true mobile social network would integrate friends from all the major social networks we participate in, plus our bevy of work colleagues from the social network hidden in our email, and, for all those non-participants out there, it would let us add them via their mobile phone number. But that really would be creepy, so we sort of hope it never happens.

According to the announcement, the Bebo Open Mobile tools are as follows (quote):

The AOL-owned (for now) 50-million* strong social networking site is most popular in the U.K., but is still a distant third worldwide, lagging far behind both Facebook and MySpace. This new initiative to deploy Bebo to mobile phones is clearly an attempt to grow their numbers by adapting their site to today's new computing platform: the mobile web. Sean Kane, global head of mobile for Bebo, confirms this, saying the move is a way to grow the reach of the network. "A rapid and global shift towards mobile social networking consumption is in progress and Bebo is committed to leading the way," he says.

Bebo Follows Industry Leaders (Again)

But Bebo is hardly "leading the way" here. Other social networks have been on the mobile web for years and already have offerings that extend beyond mobile-ready web sites to also include custom-built applications for popular handsets like Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and iPhone. In addition, the rise of the mobile web has allowed for even more social networks to spring into existence, such as Brightkite and Loopt, which are both specialized location-based networking services.

As usual, Bebo isn't leading, but following the industry leaders in the social networking arena. While this move may indeed grow Bebo's numbers somewhat, it's doubtful that it will lead to anything more than the usual game of catch-up for the much smaller service.

What's Bebo's Niche?

Bebo, whose web site's design falls somewhere in between the chaotic MySpace and the more structured and trendy Facebook, has historically struggled to define their niche. Case in point: in March of last year, they announced support for both Google's OpenSocial and Facebook's platform - a move that sent a confusing signal since the two platforms were considered competitors.

Then, like now, Bebo tries to succeed by "doing it all," (or so they think) - delivering a mix of services hand-picked from the leading social networks. What they fail to realize is that each leading network defined itself not by being some sort of homogenous blend, but by establishing a clear niche in which they could dominate. For MySpace, that niche was - and still is - music, the reason for the site's existence and now its continuing relevance. For Facebook, the niche was cleaner, more structured profiles (death to glitter text!) and greater focus on both professional and real-life networking.

Bebo's Mobile Tools: No Major Breakthroughs

What Bebo plans to offer in the mobile space will be, like their web site, a bland mix of what Facebook and MySpace already offer. It would have been great to see Bebo do something more innovative - like being the first major social network to incorporate location-based features into their mobile platform. Imagine how great it would have been to see which of your Bebo friends were nearby using the new mobile clients. Considering that the largest portion of Bebo's user base is concentrated in a relatively small part of the globe (the U.K.), an innovative feature like location-based services could have driven adoption of the Bebo platform.

Also missing from the announcement is any hint that AIM (AOL's instant messaging program) will be integrated into the mobile suite. Perhaps it will be at some point - the announcement hints at future initiatives launched throughout the year - but as of now, there's no mention of it. That also seems like a clear miss given that Bebo's parent company is AOL and the IM service was already added to the main web site in 2008. Perhaps skipping AIM integration is a snub towards AOL, who, as rumor has it, may soon be putting Bebo up for sale.

In end, today's announcement is just another example of Bebo's continuing game of copycat and not anything that breaks new ground. However, we're sure some of Bebo's core social network users will be glad to hear that real mobile services will finally become available to them.

* Note: data from comScore via AOL press release

Update: This just in! We've just heard that there may be a new version of the Bebo social network launching tomorrow. That just may prove us wrong on the whole "lack of innovation" thing. If rumors are true, the new version will address conversation fragmentation and will aggregate all your MySpace & Facebook information into your Bebo profile. Now, that could be interesting!

Brightkite users can choose to have their Facebook status updated and/or publish their location, notes, and photos directly into their Facebook News Feed.

To turn this new feature on, do the following:

1. On Brightkite visit your Account Settings, click on the Sharing tab.
2. Authorize Facebook by clicking the link next to all 3 steps.
3. Choose your Facebook cross-posting options and click save.

Brightkite promises this is only the beginning and that's there's more in store in terms of Brightkite/Facebook integration. We imagine that means they'll soon allow us to bring our Facebook friend list into Brightkite and vice versa.

The power of this integration is precisely why Facebook Connect is rapidly being adopted by web sites across the internet. That, and the fact that regular internet users immediately understand what "Connect with Facebook" means. Unfortunately, "Login with your OpenID" still has them scratching their heads.