Of course our list is subjective, so please leave a comment if we missed one of your favorites. Also let us know your thoughts on social networks going mobile. We've written before that MySpace, Facebook, and MSN are the leading mobile services - and March stats indicated that MySpace is the leader. But surely there will be one or two unknowns who rise to capture this nascent market. So with that in mind, here we go...

Dada

Dada is a mobile SNS that enables users to update personal blogs with pictures and video, download mobile entertainment, connect with and meet other local singles in real time and stay in contact with all their friends. Dada can be used on both PC and mobile, and dada.net is its portal destination page. The 3 main products within the portal are Dada Dating, Dada Life (personal space and social networking), and Mobile Entertainment.

See: Dada Leads Mobile Social Networking Charge

Strands

Recommendations company Strands started out as a music discovery mobile social networking service. Its mobile features include a mobile Web portal, a personalized radio station, and a personal version of partyStrands (its service for party organizers, bars, clubs and DJs). Strands' mobile social networking service basically enables its users to find music and network with their friends via their mobile phones.

See: MyStrands Revamp - More Integration Between Mobile, Online and Physical Worlds

Itsmy

The itsmy.com mobile community wants to be MySpace for your phone. By connecting people and content in both the U.S. and E.U., itsmy has already gathered up more than 1 million registered mobile users with 4 million mobile home and content pages and continues to grow. Recently, itsmy announced they've now launched 100,000 personal mobile TV channels - one for each of its top 10% of content-uploading customers.

See: itsmy Launches Personal Mobile Broadcasting

Frengo

In April mobile social networking company Frengo released a toolkit for development of Open Social and Facebook applications on mobile phones. The Open Social Mobile Toolkit supports MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, and Facebook and allows developers of applications on those networks to extend them to the mobile phone. In addition to extending support for the Open Social and Facebook platforms to the mobile phone, the Frengo toolkit allows developers to monetize applications via the company's social advertising platform or via premium SMS.

See: Frengo Launches Mobile Open Social Toolkit

Twango

In July 2007 Nokia acquired the media sharing service Twango. Twango combines online storage with social networking, allowing users to organize and share photos, videos and other personal media. ReadWriteWeb wrote an in-depth profile of Twango in January '07, in a post entitled Twango Tackles Lucrative Media Sharing Market. Nokia planned to use Twango to enable users to share multimedia content through their desktop and mobile devices.

See: Nokia Acquires Media Sharing Startup Twango

Shozu

Shozu is not strictly speaking a social network, but it enables you to share your videos and photos via your mobile phone - e.g. from your Flickr account, YouTube, Facebook. RWW reader Honor said in a past post that "it allows me to send the pictures I take with my n80 to Facebook and share with my friends, or email people pictures while I am at an event, shopping for stuff for them etc..."

The final 4 services are from Corvida's post on ReadWriteWeb entitled: The Future of Mobile Social Networks: 4 Promising Services

Brightkite

We recently profiled Brightkite as a winning mobile social network in the arena. Brightkite allows for your network of friends to keep track of where others may be at any moment. Since no GPS is required, users can send updates to the service via text messaging or email, to update their profile with location updates, pictures, and notes. With a host of privacy settings to prevent any form of stalking, Twitter users are increasingly using the network to update friends with status locations sent to their Twitter streams. Brightkite may be one of the best mobile networks to use, especially when going to a conference or big event in town.

Zyb

Taking a different approach from Brightkite, Zyb aims to be a mobile contact organizer for your social network. While we already have our address books for this, Zyb looks to provide a way for you to backup and synchronize your contacts online. You can store your phone numbers, calendar and texts, manage this information online, and transfer your information to a new phone if there ever comes a time. You can also use Zyb to find out who has you in their phones as a contact and even discover friends of friends. Think of Zyb as an expansion on your Facebook pictures and contacts, only more mobile.

Groovr

Groovr is your mobile network's night out on the town. Post a picture, message, or video to your Groovr profile and have it sent to all your friends too. Instant chat? Groovr's got you covered. However, some of these features are redundant. Can't we already send messages, pictures, and videos to our friends without a third party? The only feature we found remotely unique is a city's Explore page on Groovr. All of your posted items are sent to the corresponding cities Explore page. Here's a peek at San Francisco on Groovr:

Fon11

Developed by MoBlast Technologies, Fon11 could become the hottest mobile social network for the iPhone. With a nice UI (of course) and great features like the ability to see just how far away your contacts are from you, availability status messages, visibility settings and more, it seems Fon11 has a lot more to offer than the rest of the pack. Fon11 has already been ported to Android and Nokia Web Runtime with development plans in the works for J2ME and Windows Mobile platforms. While GPS remains an issue through no fault of Moblast, we've been assured that there are many strategies in development to find a resolution.

We hope you enjoyed this look at 10 interesting and exciting mobile social networks. The information in this post came from a variety of past ReadWriteWeb articles and we will continue to explore this promising market. In the meantime, please list your favorite mobile social networks in the comments below.

See also: Mobile Web Trends & Products, March '08 Update

Using the Wall

To get started, simply browse to the desired place and click the new Wall tab. Then click on the embedded Brightkite Wall to go full screen. Organizers can even customize the Wall beforehand, if desired. The message and location name can be modified, the shortcode can be selected for use within the U.S. or outside the U.S., and checkins can be turned on or off.

Of course, Brightkite has a much smaller user base than Twitter, which could have made this new feature a non-starter. However, Brightkite has that problem covered. With the Brightkite Wall, anyone can participate by texting a pre-defined shortcode provided for you by the service.

Better Than Live Blogging?

Brightkite's Wall may soon beat Twitter to become the microblogging platform of choice for live events because it offers a much richer stream of information. Instead of just displaying 140-character notes, Brightkite's Wall also displays photos. Combined with notes and checkins, this makes the Wall a much more engaging experience.

For those virtually attending the event, watching the Brightkite Wall could end up being even better than refreshing a blogger's post featuring their "live" coverage of the event. A live blog only gives you one point of view and set of images. Even if it's a group effort, it's not the same as being immediately tapped into the thoughts and reactions of all the event's attendees as you are with Brightkite.

Potential Problems

Our only concern for this new feature is that it doesn't appear to be any sort of administrative control over who can configure what. If some rogue conference attendee wanted to, he or she could highjack the Wall by customizing their own personalized greeting for all to see. That could lead to problems, especially if the message was profane or offensive.

Another concern is that there doesn't seem to be any sort of archiving system in place, so while the Wall may be a great real-time view into the thoughts and activities that are taking place at a particular point in time, going back to view older images and notes could be a challenge if the same locale (address) is used over and over again for subsequent events.

The Wall feature is still in beta, though, so as people begin to use it and submit feedback, it may be updated to even better reflect people's needs than it does now.

While these numbers are still relatively small compared to the total number of Facebook users (under 10%), it's huge for mobile social networking. Facebook has a really good mobile site and it looks like it's only getting better.

Facebook Mobile is now probably bigger than the entire userbase of Mixi, Japan's leading social network and a site that is very frequently accessed by mobile. Last week 6 leading Japanese social networks, including Mixi, MySpace Japan, Yahoo and others, announced that the companies are forming a mysterious alliance that could include content and widget sharing across their mobile sites.

We're curious how that kind of strategy will work compared to Facebook's strategy of building up a huge siloed web based social network and then creating a simple but extremely usable mobile version.

Commenting

It's interesting to see Facebook highlight the addition of commenting to its mobile interface. Non-users might not recognize what a big deal this is, but anyone who regularly uses mobile social networks (this authors' favorite is FriendFeedToGo) knows how frustrating it is to view but not interact with friends' content on your mobile. It's hugely liberating to be able to comment from your phone; it's a game changer, a feature that helps the technology move from not being worth using to being a pleasure to use.

It's early days for mobile social networking, but it's great to see market leader Facebook making great moves in feature development and user growth.

Thanks to the always-fabulous mobile blog Textually for bringing this announcement to our attention.

The series is based on a conversation I had with Gustav Praekelt, a mobile entrepreneur located in South Africa. In this post we explore how mobile technology is being used for social good in Africa. See also Part 1 here.

The Mobile Phone's Expansive Reach and The Massive Outreach Opportunity

Africa is an expansive and growing mobile market. With 300 million mobile accounts and more being added each day, the mobile phone presents a far-reaching outreach opportunity for marketers. However, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are also excited at the possibility of being able to send messages to 300 million people at the push of a button.

The Praekelt Foundation, a charitable outreach of Praekelt Consulting , is taking their knowledge of web and mobile technologies and finding ways to help Africa's needy. The Foundation finds, attracts, and incubates projects to reach out to Africa's under-served populations. Praekelt Foundation's current projects are all health-focused, but the organization is actively seeking other avenues to assist Africa's Mobile-based under-served people.

SocialTxt

SocialTxt is a project that utilizes Please Call Me (PCM) systems. To understand what a PCM message is, one must look at the nature of the African mobile market. In North America, the vast majority of cell phone customers pay on a postpaid basis, meaning most of us pay X amount of dollars for Y amount of minutes. However in Africa, the opposite as true, roughly 85-90% of customers utilize pre-paid SIMs to make and receive mobile phone service. In some African countries like Nigeria, pre-paid customers account for as much as 95% of the mobile market.

In these pre-paid dominant markets, when you run out of call credit, you can't make outgoing calls or SMS messages. To get someone to call you, you might ring them once or beep them. To respond to all this traffic generated on the mobile phone network, mobile network operators invented Please Call Me messages as a way to prompt your friends or family to call you back. A Please Call Me message is merely a SMS-like message that prompts the recipient to call the number of the requester. The PCM messages are free to send for mobile customers, up to 6 per day.

PCM messages are extremely popular in South Africa, of which 30 million messages are sent a day in a country with a population of around 47 million people.

PCM messages, in recent years, have been used by advertisers and marketers as a vehicle for marketing. Praekelt and his colleagues saw the PCM system as a tool for social change. The Praekelt Foundation thereby approached a network operator about a year ago and convinced the company to work with the Foundation to conduct a trial of positive social impact advertising.

The PCM message offers 120 characters that the Foudation and it's partners to utilize. For example, a message can be sent to encourage the recipient to call an HIV call center or medical center. The messages fill a need, as Praekelt said, "This is not fancy technology and most of the PCM message users are at the bottom of the social economic chain. These are people who don't have TV's, so programs such as SocialTxt give companies and groups a great way to reach these previously un-reachable portions of the population."

To enhance the PCM message, Praekelt Foundation, in partnership with health-focused NGOs, can insert a WAP link to a mobile website or a phone number to an interactive voice response system allowing for further health-related information to reach HIV-stricken patients.

With SocialTxt, the Praekelt Foundation has teamed up with partners such as the national HIV/AIDS Call Centeres, People Opposing Women Abuse, Netcare/Vodocom Cleft Lip Campaign, and Khomanani Zithande Campaign.

TxtAlert

HIV/AIDS is a health epidemic at the forefront of Africa's focus for health outreach. Of 33 million people in the world who are HIV Positive, 22 million of them live in Sub-Saharan Africa. Of those 22 million, 5 million are in South Africa alone. This means, as Praekelt points out, that roughly 10% of the world's HIV-positive population lives in South Africa.

TxtAlert is a project that uses SMS messages to remind HIV patients to go to the health clinic for their next visit. In addition to notifying patients of the upcoming appointments, TxtAlert also requests them to reschedule if they are unable to attend. These efforts are aimed at keeping patients engaged in their treatment programs and to deter them from discontinuing their HIV/AIDS treatment programs.

The Praekelt Foundation's research found that even though most of the partner clinic's patients were jobless, more than 90% of these patients have at least one working cell phone in their household. Naturally, SMS is a viable communication method in such a situation.

In addition to prompting patients to attend their appointments, TxtAlert is being used by health clinics to incentivize those who come to the clinic as well. After a patient attends an appointment, TxtAlert will send the patient a text saying "Thank you for coming to the clinic, remember your next appointment is coming up on ". The patient will then receive a reminder text 90 days before the appointment, 2 weeks prior and so on. Well performing patients get free airtime and cell phones as incentives for coming in.

The Praekelt Foundation and partner clinics are experiencing favorable results with SocialTxt. On average, a typical clinic will have a 15% no-show rate for patient appointments. However, when a clinic utilizes SocialTxt, those rates drop to around 3%.

Praekelt points out that a great factor about SocialTxt is that deploying the system doesn't require vast amounts of capital and infrastructure. The main building block is an electronic patient record system and the rest is done behind the scenes by the TxtAlert software. The system is highly scalable as usage and needs rise. The Praekelt Foundation is currently working with a pilot clinic with about 10,000 users on the system. However, they are adding more clinics and will soon be up to 120,000 users on the SocialTxt system.

A third project utilizing SocialTxt will be unveiled at the Pop!Tech conference in October. Pop!Tech gave funding to the Praekelt Foundation to send out thousands of PCM messages regarding HIV/AIDs education.

Mobilisr

Mobile messaging is a far-reaching conduit for reaching a mass audience. The Praekelt Foundation, along with co-lead organization Cell-Life, is working to build an open source, high speed and highly reliable mobile messaging platform called Mobilisr.

Mobilisr could be used for health-related outreach, but also be used by governments and public-safety organizations to send out messages relating to: human rights monitoring, elections monitoring, emergency alerts, conducting public surveys, or could even be used by a group to organize protests.

Prakelt also told me that Mobilisr is enabling customers to conduct SMS voting (much like American Idol's text messaging voting system). The problem with the existing SMS voting systems, as he explains, is that they are built on proprietary systems. Te Prakelt Foundation is working with NGO's (such as Cell-Life) to build SMS based pledge lines and incentive systems built upon WAP sites.

Mobilisr just launched on October 1st. It will be interesting to see how the technology is employed by NGOs and other groups for social good.

Conclusion

With mobile phone technology spreading so rapidly across the African continent, there are many opportunities to reach out to Africa's under-served population. Any vehicle that offers access to the population should be exploited. It's a shame that many people in these groups are being ignored, even though many of them have mobile phones.

It is great to see organizations such as the Praekelt Foundation working with mobile network operators, health clinics, and NGOs to connect Africa's under-served population with the care and services they need to be happy, informed, and perhaps more healthy.

About The Author

Photo: Paul Watson

In order to use the new mobile photo upload feature, you must first log in to your MySpace account on the web to enable the setting. Once there, click on "My Account," then click "Mobile." You should see a section called "Send Photos From Your Phone." From here, you can set a password and MySpace will generate a unique, personalized email address for you to add to your phone's address book. The next time you take a mobile pic, you can just email it to MySpace using this address. The photo will show up in seconds. Unfortunately, there is no way to configure the mobile uploads to go into any particular album - they are all put into your "My Photos" album by default.

MySpace has had a mobile web site available for some time at m.myspace.com where you could interact with many of the service's features. However, there was no option to upload photos from that site.

Blackberry App Coming In "A Few Weeks"

In the comments of the blog post, everyone's friend "Tom" reveals some more news that wasn't mentioned in the original post. In response to a user's comment, Tom confirms that the MySpace Blackberry app announced last month is almost ready. Says Tom, the Blackberry app will be available "in a few weeks." (Wow, that's almost a year after Facebook released theirs!) Why is MySpace so slow to support mobile? Given Facebook's growing popularity, you would think that MySpace would have had these features and apps ages ago.

This is further supported by data about what consumers do when mobile social networking. Checking for both comments and messages from their friends register above 50% for mobile social network users and 45% of users post status updates. In other words, they're doing the same sort of things on their phone as they would do if at their computer. The phone is just an extension of their online social networking life, not a separate and different platform for new types of interactions.

The survey, which was conducted 2Q, 2008, interviewed 500 users of online social networks. Out of those users, only 1% had visited a social network on their phone only. A mobile social network, for example, would be phone-only. Yikes. That number is low.

So Where Does This Leave Mobile Social Networks?

At first glance, we have to admit, these numbers don't look promising for mobile social networks. Although it's possible that some of these social networks will stick around thanks to strong and supportive niche audiences, it doesn't look like any today are poised for mainstream success.

Then again, it could just be too soon to tell. Given how long it takes for mainstream users to discover any new technology, it may be just a matter of time before mobile social networking really takes off. With the recent explosion of new touchscreen smart phones (iPhone, Android, , HTC Dream, Instinct, LG Dare, etc.) designed with web surfing in mind, mobile social networking could still be right around the corner.

Buzzd is a mobile social network that caters to the latest events going on in your town. Want to know where your friends are right now? How about finding out how many people in your network are at an event you've been debating on attending? Buzzd could be just what you were looking for. The award winning service has the scoop on all the hottest bars, clubs, and social scenes in your town. All of which is conveniently available from your mobile phone browser or via a text message.

Features

With multiple partnerships with Flavorpill, TimeOut, and Zagat, Buzzd provides its user base with over 1.2 million venue listings. With each venue listing users can grab maps, directions, and live reviews before heading out the door. All of this is readily available from the Buzzd WAP site, meaning no download required. Users can also add their favorite venues to their Buzzd profile to receive notifications of upcoming events. If you're a promoter, stay tuned for more news on a future release for Buzzd PRO. This service will allow promoters and artists to gain mass exposure on the Buzzd network with their own custom profiles and more.

Partying With Buzzd, but Only in Metropolitan Areas

The service is available across a plethora of handsets. It also works with just about every American mobile carrier. We recommend checking out the service if you're in a major metropolitan area such as New York, San Francisco, L.A., or Miami. However, like every other mobile social network, Buzzd is only valuable in the big city. We tested the service in Atlanta and Miami and found plenty of places to go and venue reviews to help us decide what was worth our time and money. Once we traveled to less tech oriented lands, it was clear that we'd have to resort to more arcane methods of finding what's buzzing. Don't get us wrong, we think Buzzd is one of the best mobile networks for finding events, but only if you're in a major city. Sorry suburbia.

Virgin Mobile Branded

On the other hand, Virgin Mobile subscribers are in for a real treat. Today, Buzzd announced its latest partnership with mobile carrier. Virgin Mobile will be the first carrier to formally offer Buzzd to its subscribers. Virgin Mobile subscribers can look forward to a ton of exclusives and can access a Virgin Mobile branded version of Buzzd from the Virgin Mobile WAP homepage. This partnership will allow subscribers of the Virgin Mobile network to share their latest happenings with others on the same network via Buzzd. Hopefully by partnering with Virgin Mobile, Buzzd will be able to expand its networks offerings not only to smaller carriers, but smaller cities.

So, what, exactly is Genome, then? Well, it's not really just one thing - it's four:

1. Social Network: Genome a social network like any other. You'll have a user profile, friends, and tools that let you social with them in comfortable, natural ways.
2. Contact Manager: You'll be able to keep track of your contacts' information on Genome.
3. Instant Messenger: Genome will provide an open instant messenger that's integrated with your contacts.
4. Identity & Social Graph Provider: Genome will have an open identity policy so your Genome identity is easily sharable with other sites. That means that other sites and services can query Genome for some pieces of your personal information.

The Genome project has only been in development for three months and most of the details on how it operates, technically speaking, are being kept quiet. However, we got a look at some of their plans as well as some screenshots of the mobile app.

What Genome Is Not

Genome is not an aggregator spock.com profiles or FriendFeed. Genome can function as your central identity, not a collection of your identities out on the web nor a collection of your social web activities.

It's not a competitor to other data portability movements like Facebook Connect, MySpace's Data Availability, or Google Friend Connect. Instead, Genome will work cooperate with them to give users control over their own data. To do so, Genome will not use any closed, proprietary protocols - only open standards.

What Genome Will Let You Do

Because it will use open protocols, the goal is to let users carry their identites anywhere on the web. Updates made to those identities out on the web will make their way back to Genome instead of users having to return to Genome to edit their profiles.

You'll be able to access Genome's service from a web app, a desktop client (they have a Windows, Mac, and Linux client planned), and a mobile app. A Google Android client has already been built, too. In fact, Genome's creators are particularly focused on the mobile market and are working on real-time sync and location awareness in this area. Of course, developers will also be able to build their own web apps and clients thanks to Genome's open standards and API.

We got a sneak peek at the Android app, but be warned, the app is still very much in alpha and may change a lot prior to launch:

To deal with "noise" Genome is implementing something they're calling a "real-life relationships" model. In your real life, says co-founder Chernyshov, "you can control who knows what about you, and you can control what you know about them." Those granular relationships will be available on Genome, yet kept as simple as possible.

How You'll Use Genome (At First)

There aren't too many details on the specifics of how you will use Genome or the technical details as to how Genome operates, but we do that the first public release will only be the beginning of their effort to solve all the problems noted at the beginning of this post. The first iteration of Genome will be focused on the problem of identity management.

In the area of contact and identity management, the problems that Genome wants to solve specifically include the following: you can't import or export data on today's social networks, you can't control who sees what about you, you can't watch who knows what about you, and you can't ask a new web service to retrieve your name, email, contacts, etc. from a social network site. Well, as for that last issue, data portability is supposed to address this, but perhaps Genome's creators aren't interested in waiting for the major providers to make it work.

To start off, you'll be able to import your address book contacts and (possibly) import friends from various social networks. (They aren't sure if they will have that feature ready for the first public launch or not). However, they do plan on supporting Google Friend Connect and, further down the road, they will offer automatic contacts discovery.

Once you add a contact to Genome, it's yours - it's not locked in any way. Unlike a network like Facebook, for example, who locks in your contacts so you have to keep using their walled garden service, the data from Genome can be freely moved about the web. If you add someone to Genome then invite them to join the service, their profile will be automatically linked with the contact you've already created. The details don't need to be re-entered.

Other Issues Being Addressed

As the Genome project progresses, future versions of the service will focus more on privacy concerns, distractions, quality interactions, and advertisements. (More details can be found on this post about Genome.) How these issues will be dealt with is currently under wraps.

Privacy: Privacy levels will be set up to mirror real-life relationships: spouse or significant other, family, best friend, friend, buddy, colleague, business partner, high school acquaintance, contact, etc. Human relationships have detailed nuances - social networks should, too.

Distractions: Social networks today are bogging us down with messages, invitations, pokes, and friend requests. Some of these matter, some of these waste our time, but how can we pay attention to only the really important things? Genome plans to address this.

Quality Issues: The more "friends" you have, the less rich the interactions and the relationships you maintain with your friends on your social networks. Interactions become one-way, more similar to RSS than to real relationships.

Ads: Today's ads are often irrelevant, usually unwanted, and sometimes even inappropriate. Even targeted ads seem to miss the mark. If Genome truly has a solution for this problem, that will be extremely impressive.

Conclusion

At the moment, Genome sounds almost too good to be true - a social networking service that solves all our problems? Nevertheless, it's certainly intriguing. If it can really do what it proposes to do, then it's worth signing up for (sign-up is here).

Facebook Requests: Dan Zen