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LikeMe, a social recommendation site similar to Yelp.com lets users rate and review local businesses, attractions, restaurants, and clubs. After you join the service, you can upload info about yourself, your favorite places, and your favorite things to do in order to kick start the service's personalized social recommendation engine.

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.

From HP's Social Computing Lab comes news of Friendlee, an entirely new kind of social network that focuses on the intimate connections between close friends, family, and colleagues. The application, designed to operate on your mobile phone, tracks your call and messaging history to provide an ambient awareness of who your "real" friends are and then adds those people to your social network. Not only that, but Friendlee also tracks the businesses you call frequently to identify your preferred services which can then be used as recommendations to your network of friends.

In a new report, Nielsen Online takes a closer look at how social media and video sites have reshaped the web and the online advertising market over the last few years, especially in the context of the current economic crisis. According to Nielsen, since 2003, the time spent on video sites has increased by over 2,000%, and the number of Americans who visit online video sites like YouTube and Hulu has climbed 339% over the same time period.

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.

Yesterday we discussed MIT's project WikiCity, which monitors location data in cities via mobile sensors and creates visualizations from that. That project comes out of the SENSEable City lab at MIT and in our post we questioned whether there is any practical value in WikiCity currently or if it is simply "info porn". In this post we look at a commercial company that is doing much of the same thing by using data mining and real time analytics and trying to make a business from that. The company is Sense Networks and its stated aim is to index the real world "using real-time and historical location data for predictive analytics across multiple industries." Sense Networks was founded by top computer scientists from MIT and Columbia University.

MySpace just announced that it will bring its Open Platform to Windows Mobile phones. The new MySpace mobile application for Windows Mobile will be built on top of Microsoft's Silverlight platform. In addition, MySpace also announced its MySpace Silverlight SDK, which will make it easier for developers to build OpenSocial applications using Silverlight.

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

In August 2008, Twitter killed SMS updates for everybody outside of the U.S., Canada, and India. Users in the U.K. can now only send messages from their phones, but can't receive them anymore. The developers of Twe2 got frustrated by this and decided to take matters into their own hands. Thanks to Twe2's free service, you can now receive Twitter messages on your mobile phone close to anywhere in the world.

Yesterday, Google announced a new mobile location-aware application called Latitude, which lets you track your friends' whereabouts using your mobile phone. The move will have major ramifications to the current mobile social networking market which was just beginning to get off the ground. The question we must ask now is this: did Google just validate mobile social networking ...or did they just kill all the competition?