More than 10% of smartphone users connected to a social network in January, up almost 5 percentage points from a year ago.

By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek

A rising number of smartphone Web browsers are being used to access social networking sites, an indication of how the online services are extending beyond the PC.


“Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web,” Mark Donovan, senior VP of mobile at ComScore, said in a statement. “Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile since mobile devices are at the center of how people communicate with their circle of friends, whether by phone, text, email, or, increasingly, accessing social networking sites via a mobile browser.”ComScore measured smartphone and other mobile phone use only through the use of the devices’ browsers. The numbers do not include access by the nearly 6 million phone users who only use mobile applications.

In looking at mobile phone users as a whole, Comscore found that more than one in 10 used the device’s browser to connect to a social network, an increase of almost 5 percentage points from a year ago.

More than 25 million Facebook users accessed the site via a mobile browser, which was more than double the number of MySpace users. Facebook’s mobile phone audience has exceeded MySpace’s since February 2009, three months before Facebook surpassed MySpace as the leading social network on the Web, according to ComScore.

Twitter, which has experienced tremendous growth in both mobile and PC-based visitors, attracted 4.7 million mobile users in January.

The influence of smartphones as an access point to the Web is growing in the United States as more people buy the devices. At the end of 2009, 17% of mobile phone users had smartphones, up from 11% at the end of 2008, according to ComScore.

In January, almost one in three smartphone users accessed social networks with their mobile browsers, up more than 8 percentage points from a year ago, Web metrics firm ComScore said Wednesday. The number of cellular phone users in general connecting to Facebook through a mobile browser grew 112% from a year ago, while Twitter experienced a 347% jump.

Later today, Google is due to launch a social product that will compete with the currently popular social networks - Facebook


and Twitter. As Wall Street Journal reported, Gmail will get a new module that will stream media and status updates of online friends. This module sounds like a Gmail Labs feature which could be enabled or disabled by account holder’s choice.
However, it’s less likely to be a rival since Google itself has integrated Twitter updates in its search. Maybe Google will bring Orkut updates integration in Gmail - well, that’s just one of the many possibilities. Michael Arrington, TechCrunch CEO, noted that Google’s upcoming social product will go beyond Gmail integration.

Google has already enabled watching YouTube videos in Gmail Chat. Also, YouTube, Flickr and Picasa media previews in mail have been there since a while. Whatever the integration into Gmail would be like, there’s always a kill switch to bring the service back to normal.

If Google’s upcoming social product affects Gmail, the fear of outages and security always persists. Not to forget that this announcement follows Facebook’s homepage redesign and as we know, Google’s online rival Microsoft is one of the stake holders in Facebook. In August 2009, Yahoo had introduced social features in its mail, search and messenger service.

Google Trends was originally released as a tool that let you see visual comparisons between search volume of keywords. That hasn’t changed, but Google now also gives us the keys to more data about actual popularity of websites based on daily unique visitors.

This data is similar to what companies like Alexa already provides, but it’s not ready to be a complete replacement yet. There is not as much data available through Google Trends as there is in other tools. Searches are currently limited to the domain level — so blogs.zdnet.com would translate to zdnet.com before the search happens.

If you have a popular enough website to be included in these results from Google Trends, you may be disappointed to know that there is no way to remove your site if you wanted to. Google doesn’t think that rule should apply to them though, as they have removed all their web properties — searching for things like google.com or youtube.com comes back with nothing.

It seems a given that mobile social networking is going to be “the next big thing”, but squinting at tiny text is still a pain on today’s phones. To deal with this issue, Blabnote, a British startup that is currently in private beta, has created what may be the world’s first “vocal social network.”

To login to the network, you simply call Blabnote from your phone, which uses caller ID to match you to your profile. From there, you can vocally enter any number of commands. For example, if I wanted to create a group for TechCrunch fans, I might say, “Create Group called ‘Team TechCrunch’”. Members can be added by saying, “add Mike and Mark”, and you can send messages to group members in a similar fashion.

Blabnote has no shortage of obstacles to overcome, to put it mildly. For one, the entire system is going to rely on voice recognition, which isn’t exactly a perfected technology. Imagine creating a very personal voice message and sending it to an ex-girlfriend on accident - the setup is ripe for disaster. And should you get sick of talking (and listening), you’re out of luck: there is no web management interface, though Blabnote says it will provide an API for third parties.

Blabnote could be a useful organization and notification tool for established groups, like soccer teams or clubs. But if it aspires to become a large social network, this company is going to be teetering perilously close to the DeadPool.

Members of international social network hi5 will now be able to access and play massive multiplayer online-style casual online games with friends, family and colleagues on other popular social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, through the first social gaming community, Mytopia.

Launched on March 24, 2008, by company owners and siblings Guy and Galia Ben-Artzi, Mytopia is, according to its creators, the first casual MMO and aims to bring together the social features typically found in hardcore MMO games to timeless, casual favourites like chess, backgammon, bingo, dominoes, sudoku and Texas Hold’em, to name a few.

“Bringing Mytopia to hi5 users is part of our mission to help the world play together – from any social network, any widget, any online entry point,” said Guy Ben-Artzi, founder and chief executive officer of Mytopia. “Today, online social networks are isolated from one another. Members of different communities really can’t socialise with each other freely.

“Mytopia and others in the games industry are changing that. We’re building bridges, uniting these islands of isolation to form a larger, converged community that welcomes internet users from every corner of the modern web.”

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