Social Networking Moves to the Mobile phone

The New York Times has an article on the emerging shifts towards transplanting Internet networking onto mobile phones. In particular, the grab for mobile social networking:

Social networks may be nothing new to habitués of the Internet. Several years of competition among Facebook, MySpace and Friendster have generated tens of millions of members.

But now the market is teeming with companies that want to bring the same phenomenon to the cellphone. There are so many “mobile social networking” upstarts, in fact, that when New Media Age magazine in Britain tried to identify the “ones to watch,” it ended up naming 10 companies.

Some of those in the thick of battle are resigned to having a lot of company. “If there weren’t competitors, there wouldn’t be a market,” said Dan Harple, founder and chief executive of GyPSii, a mobile social network based in Amsterdam that is a contender. “Maybe there are 30 or more now — in three years, there will be 5 that matter.”

The prize, as these start-ups see it, is the 3.3 billion cellphone subscribers, a number that far surpasses the total of Internet users.

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