Social Networking Tops On Mobiles, Says Openwave

Openwave Systems Inc. revealed research on trends for the mobile internet in North America, based on its Mobile Analytics product.

Social networking is the number one area of interest to the mobile internet user. The top two search terms on both Google and Yahoo! OneSearch were the major social networking sites Facebook and MySpace. This suggests a significant appetite for mobile social networking. In addition to the named social networks, 'social networking' was also the top category of search terms found by Openwave's research.

Carriers may be underserving mobile social networking is the fact that the mobile-tailored social network Mocospace, a Boston-based startup that provides a social network for mobile phone users, attracted far more of mobile internet users' time. Mocospace users spent an average of 6.05 minutes online per session, versus MySpace's 3.79 minutes and Facebook's 1.89 minutes, suggesting that more effort to tailor social networking sites to the mobile environment could lead to greater data usage and customer satisfaction.