Facebook.com's mastermind Mark Zuckerberg smiles at his office in Palo Alto, Calif. in this Feb. 5, 2007 file photo. (Paul Sakuma/Associated Press)

For 16-year-old Bevlyn Hetz in Richmond Hill, Ont., a cellphone is her window to her entire social network of 300 friends and acquaintances.

"I use it for Facebook, text messaging, talking, MSN — just about anywhere I can go on the internet," says Hetz. "I use it pretty much from when I wake up to when I go to sleep. If I didn't have it, I would die!"

Hetz and her classmates even log onto their phones when they're bored in class to "poke" their friends (send a query to see what they're up to), write messages on people's Facebook walls and send text messages.

Mari Ito poses in front of a computer screen showing her Facebook profile in Toronto, March 13, 2007. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)

Jodi Echakowitz says with amusement that the only way to find Hetz when she needs her to babysit her two children is through her mobile social circle. "When you're connecting on the teenager level, you have to do it through messaging," says the public relations consultant, who is as equally proficient at operating social networking applications on her own mobile. "E-mail for them is passé."

It's not just the kids taking a shine to mobile social networking.

Business professionals, including senior executives, are increasingly drawn to their cellphones to network in all forms with colleagues and family members.

Bjorn Wentlandt, a native Torontonian who works as a talent agent at MacDonald-Murray Management in Los Angeles, confesses to being a "brutal user of Facebook" at home and on his phone. It's an important requirement in a culture where social multitasking 24/7 is a matter of competitive survival.

[Cellphones] are in fact mirrors and windows — mirrors of me and windows to my stuff."

—Dave Neale, senior VP at Telus

"There's a whole lot of hurry up and wait in this business," says Wentlandt, who freely admits to being an Entourage-type cliché. "Having that level of access [to people] is expected. I often go on Facebook and browse when I'm waiting for a show or a meeting to start."

As Dave Neale, senior vice-president with Telus Consumer Solutions in Toronto, says it's not just about phones anymore. "[Cellphones] are in fact mirrors and windows — mirrors of me and windows to my stuff."

And those windows and mirrors are looked at more and more with each passing day.

Mobile social networking a welcome revenue booster

A recently released Ipsos Insights report indicated that more than half of all U.S. social networkers use their mobile device to send and/or receive SMS text and e-mails, browse the internet for news and information, and receive digital images.

Sumeet Khanna, director of Windows Live Services for the online services group at Microsoft Canada in Toronto, reports that 84 per cent of Canadian internet users have visited a social networking site. "Of course, they want that access while they're on the go."

Neale adds that there have been more than 20 million page views on Facebook through the Telus wireless network since the company introduced the service for mobile earlier in 2007.

There has also been a flurry of deals forged between the likes of Microsoft, Google, Rogers et al with social networking phenoms YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, among others. Anyone with a product or service to market seems to want a piece of the social networking action.

And it's no wonder, given that teens and executives are gobbling up the applications like candy. The appetite for social networking on mobile is a welcome revenue booster in a world where carriers have had to reduce the cost of voice services on mobiles to the point where they can't sustain long-term profitability.

According to Informa Telecoms and Media research firm, revenue from mobile social networking applications reached $3.45 billion worldwide in 2006, with projections it will reach more than $5 billion by the end of 2007 and $13 billion by 2011.

In the same report, it was noted that social networking activity has quickly shot up to where it now makes up 10 per cent of value-added services for wireless companies, second only to music services. (Value-added services are described as any kind of data- or airtime-related service that generates revenue.)

"Everyone has come to the same conclusion," says John McCAlla, chief technology office for mobile application developer Bluestreak Technology Inc. in Montreal. "They see that their future growth is through data services and are moving beyond being providers of phones with an operating system and a dialer, to devices that connect hosted services."

Don't yet equal computer apps

Terminology

3G: The third generation of cellphones and wireless services. 3G includes a range of "true" multimedia capabilities (sound, video, etc.), as well as increased bandwidth and transfer rates to accommodate the new multimedia functions of the phones.

SMS: Short Message Service, or text messaging, is the term for using keypads of mobile telecommunications devices to compose written notes, then sending and receiving messages using wireless handsets.

Despite the numbers, the execution in bringing social networking to the cellular world has some way to go before the level of experience will reach that of surfing the internet on a personal computer, notes Anup Murarka, director of technical marketing for mobile and devices at Adobe Systems Inc. in San Jose, Calif.

"We have yet to see the same level of capability to the mobile world. Applications [on mobile] to date have delivered a pretty flat experience, have high latency issues and are inconsistent."

In other words they lack bells and whistles, and they tend to be sluggish compared to surfing the sites on a desktop or notebook computer.

Steve Haney, senior director of worldwide marketing for Tira Wireless in San Mateo, Calif., agrees that going from the wired web to the mobile world doesn't always offer the best user experience.

Delivering mobile content is not as simple as the desktop PC world, where one iteration of an application only has to run on a mere handful operating systems. Applications for mobile devices must be adapted for dozens — if not hundreds — of operating systems.

"Everyone's got content, but the carriers are putting up walls because they don't want their applications available to everyone," Haney explains. "It's an infinitely bigger market than the PC, but the whole model goes against the grain [of how operators like to work]. And scalability is what makes social networking applications work."

All that will change dramatically in the months to come, say observers. The hardware is much more capable of delivering a smooth social networking experience as devices and wireless services get faster. The latest handsets generally have memory and processing power that's up to the job of handling feature-rich, web-based applications.

Broadband access — an absolutely critical part of getting these applications working the way they should — is also being addressed with the rollout of high-speed 3G networks, and in some cases, WiMAX networks.

"Speed of uplinks is really important to social networking, because so much of the experience is visual," says Neale.

The move to more open access is happening despite carriers' best efforts to the contrary, says Haney. "The day will come that carriers will have to open their networks, handset manufacturers will need to unlock their devices, and broadband will be as freely accessible as WiFi is today — then you will have the scalability to see social networking really take off."

Having that kind of access may make the parents and teachers of teens like Hetz blanch at the prospect of them spending even more face time on phones, but the avid social networker says she can't wait to get the newest flip phone model with video streaming. "But I don't think my mom will let me yet."

Given most of her friends are already sporting video-capable phones, it's only a matter of time.

The author is a Toronto-based freelance writer

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