The New York Times had a great story today on the state of mobile social networks. The bad news for the US? Most of the fun is currently happening overseas.

Social Networking Moves to the Cellphone

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. The advantage over computer-based communities, they believe, is the ability to know where a cellphone is, thanks to global positioning satellites and related technologies.

I was chatting with the wicked-smart analyst Christine Perey earlier this week, who wrote a very thorough report on Mobile Social Networks. One of the most interesting things she shared with me was that by her estiamtes there were 100MM unique users of Mobile Social Networks today. Based on her predictive models, we could see grow to 200 to 300 million by 2009.

What is clear from speaking with Christine and from the NYT article:
- We are poised for explosive growth in this space
- The US is way behind Europe and Asia, and the domestic carriers are slow to upgrade, standardize and offer new services
- The US carriers are holding back potentially billions of dollars in unrealized market value by not allowing 3rd party data access, applications (natively) and not upgrading service (speed)

I will be blogging more about Christine's report when I receive the executive summary.

We will be discussing Mobile Social Networks in great detail at the Mobile Communities Unconference 3/20 in Palo Alto. Early bird registration ends today (3/7/08).
http://mcu2008.eventbrite.com/