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Mobile life is blooming. Some 47 mobile social network companies have emerged globally, to help cater to our need to message and communicate while on the go.

But what about the huge incumbents, like MySpace or Facebook? Will they thrive on the mobile web?

Well, the 47 mobile-only networks will probably tell you that mobile is a whole different animal, and downplay the threat of a switch by their millions of users to those big guys. But in reality, even though some mobile-only social networks have gotten big — Mocospace, for example, has 1 billion page views worldwide, most of it in the US — their computer-based rivals are catching up now that new wireless devices, such as the iPhone, are making it easier for internet apps to transition to mobile.

My goal for this article was to find the top ten most significant social mobile companies.

It was difficult reporting. With so many different players competing in the mobile social network space, we’re seeing a lot of different approaches and fragmentation. For my own thinking, I sketched out a diagram during lunch with an entrepreneur (see above for a cleaned up version of it). It’s partly based on generalizations, but it’ll give you an idea of what’s happening here in the U.S.

I’ve organized the mobile social companies into four groups. In addition to heavyweights MySpace and Facebook, I’ve picked eight companies — based on market share, differentiation through features, niche market and technology — that seem to be emerging as the most significant players.

[Disclosure: I consult for one of the companies named here, Peperoni.]

Group 1: The internet heavyweights – MySpace and Facebook
When I talked to MySpace and Facebook to see what kind of uptake they’d been seeing on their mobile sites (eg. m.myspace.com) I got quite a surprise. According to the user numbers they provided, both companies have already passed Mocospace.

MySpace’s Brandon Lucas, Senior Director of Mobile Business Development told me MySpace Mobile USA had 1.4 billion visits last month. That’s compared to 1 billion visits to Mocospace this March, according to Mocospace CEO Justin Siegel. A source at Facebook confirmed to me that Facebook Mobile has also passed Mocospace’s numbers in the USA, too, but didn’t give me specific numbers. Expect announcements on that in the coming weeks.

MySpace Mobile launched in December 2006, followed by Facebook Mobile a month later. The growth of MySpace Mobile and Facebook Mobile is mainly due to operator deals that put them “ondeck.” MySpace and Facebook are looking to close as many deals with operators as possible. For Myspace Mobile, the goal is to be available on-deck with “every major operator, everywhere,” Lucas says. As of now, MySpace Mobile has signed 23 carriers in 13 countries, and we expect the number to rise. M-Metrics told MySpace Mobile around three weeks ago that they are the fastest growing mobile site in the US, says Lucas.

The barrier to traffic growth, according to Lucas, is awareness. Expect more banner ads for MySpace Mobile on its web site very soon to raise awareness. MySpace is willing to split revenue with operators, he says. Despite the split, “mobile advertising has grown in the last six months to be a real business for us”, he adds. He sees MySpace as playing the same role on mobile devices as it does on the web. He wants MySpace to be a “mobile advertising driver” for the industry — and wants to lure the brands advertising on its online version to add mobile advertising too. He said MySpace Mobile “wants to build a business for everybody” and that “we will share insights for everybody to profit.”

I also asked Lucas to comment on a MySpace strategy statement I came across in Stuart Dredge’s recent article on social mobile networking in New Media Age: ”We expect that half of our total traffic will be coming from mobile devices within the next five years,” the article quoted a MySpace representative as saying. Brandon said that’s a January quote from MySpace CEO Chris De Wolfe and reaffirms that mobile is one of the Read the rest of this entry »

The market for social networking on your mobile phone is wide open, with neither Facebook nor Google offering anything compelling.

Right now, mobile communication revolves around texting, and it’s unlikely move away from that soon. It’s no surprise then, that most companies building mobile social networks are building around texting. Mig33 has seen success in Asia by offering texting, but also IM and phone service around it.

But texting has a big drawback. It doesn’t offer a lot of intelligence – there’s no way to let you peer into your list of friends or capture other content from friends. BluePulse, backed with $6 million from VantagePoint Venture Partners, is the latest to focus on building a mobile network around SMS — by bringing SMS, email, and phone all into one interface. The company says it already is getting 100 million page views monthly with its existing messaging service, which lets friends share things like photos.

Today it launches its new messaging service. It works for smart-phones, including Blackberries, Treos and iPhones, having only worked on Java-enabled phones until now. You can download it through your Web browser.

The interface is straight-forward and simple enough to use. The question is whether people will really want to merge all their communications — IM, email, phone — into a single interface at Bluepulse. It’s easy to do, and might get some takers, but its too early to tell how viral this can be without some extra umph.

Here’s how it works. You get a free download at Bluepulse.com, which installs the application onto your phone. It lets you add friends (they must accept) and then message them directly, or message them in groups. [Note: The service isn’t downloading to our Treo properly today; this article is written on the basis of a demo several days ago.]

Bluepulse then functions by separating your sending and receiving screens.

Your sending screen gives you the ability to send any kind of message to a single friend, or to a group of friends. You can send to their email, SMS account, or phone number. This way, you can start all your communication within Bluepulse. Bluepulse says it is the only mobile messaging system to bring all outgoing forms of communication into one screen.

But Bluepulse recognizes that if you’re sending a text to someone, they’ll respond by text. When they do, the text message arrives with a link. You hit the link in your text, and it takes you into your Bluepulse account, where you can continue. The same thing happens with email. If they respond by email, you a link takes you into your Bluepulse account.

You can store up to 10,000 messages in your inbox, and you can filter by what you’ve read, and what you haven’t read, or search for communications with certain friends.

By letting you create a group, say “family,” you can message your relatives. It provides status page, too, letting you show images of your latest activity. [In this way, it is trying to offer a Twitter effect too]. You can also seek to befriend people who your friends have included on group messages.

It lets you add friends from your Facebook, Orkut, Gmail, MSN and MySpace accounts.

Mobile social networking company Bluepulse has raised $6 million in funding, announcing it two days after a key competitor made a similar announcement.

Bluepulse lets mobile phone users create profiles, and then message and IM each other, as well as share photos and videos. You download its software from its Web site. It’s similar to MocoSpace, which on Monday said it had raised $3 million. Lots of other companies, including Eqo, offer similar services.

The company, formerly based in Sydney, has now officially launched in the U.S., installing its headquarters in the former YouTube offices in Silicon Valley’s San Mateo. Not coincidentally, it is just down the road from the offices of VantagePoint Venture Partners, the firm that made the investment.

Juniper Research forecasts revenues from mobile carriers coming from user-generated content will increase tenfold over the next five years, reaching $5.74 billion, the company notes. Social networking features will account for half of that, and mobile social networking subscribers will hit an eye-opening 600 million in 2012, up from a mere 14 million this year, the study says.

The company was founded by Ben Keighran, 25, in Australia, five years ago. We talked with Keighran several months ago, and he said the trick was to make the service compatible with as many phones as possible.

The company is selectively releasing user metrics to make them sound high, which raises a yellow warning flag for us. It refuses to disclose the number of its active users, instead saying it the service has been downloaded more than two million times. This, of course, creates the impression that it has millions of users, when everyone knows people download services all the time and then never use them. The company says it has close to 100 million page views a month, another metric that has lost its meaning these days when page views can be created in any number of ways.