December 24, 2009 — 12:01am ET | By Jason Ankeny

Mobile social networking continued to snowball in 2009, and now represents close to half of all mobile web usage in the U.S. Four of the top 10 web domains accessed via U.S. mobile devices are social networking sites according to mobile software applications and infrastructure provider Openwave Systems’ October 2009 Mobile Insights report. Those results correspond with recent findings by the Internet Advertising Bureau indicating a 179 percent year-over-year increase in the number of mobile handsets accessing social media sites, compared to a 10 percent increase in PC visitors to the same sites.

Facebook remains the social networking service to beat, at least in the U.S. Facebook is now the nation’s second most-visited mobile website (behind only search giant Google) according to browser development firm Opera Software, and boasts more than 65 million active mobile users worldwide, up from 20 million in late 2008. In addition to its mobile site, Facebook offers a host of applications optimized for all major mobile operating systems, enabling users to update their status, share photos, browse News Feeds and reach out to friends wherever they go. Facebook’s iPhone application consistently ranks among the App Store’s most popular free downloads, and mobile device buyers as a whole express significantly greater interest in accessing Facebook than competing social networking services MySpace or Twitter, according to a recent consumer survey issued by research firm Strategy Analytics.

Speaking of Twitter, its explosive growth is one of the signature stories of 2009. In October, Twitter topped the 5 billion tweet threshold according to a counter posted on the GigaTweet website, which analyzes Twitter messages in real time; the GigaTweet counter stood at 1.6 billion tweets as of April 2009, meaning Twitter users posted about 3.4 billion tweets in a span of six month. At last count, Twitter users worldwide top 50 million, and the company is valued at $1 billion, although there is growing concern the Twitter fad has peaked. According to data provided to eMarketer by Nielsen, traffic to Twitter.com was down a staggering 27.8 percent between September and October 2009, falling to 18.9 million unique visitors. However, some pundits contend the decrease in website traffic is a result of users migrating to third-party Twitter applications and mobile services.

Specific sites may fade from view–MySpace looks set to join Friendster in the “Whatever happened to?” file–but the mobile social networking concept is here to stay. The number of subscribers accessing social networking sites via mobile device will grow to 607.5 million worldwide by 2013, representing 43 percent of global mobile web users, according to a forecast issued in November by eMarketer. Mobile social networkers in the U.S. will grow to 56.2 million by 2013, representing about 45 percent of the nation’s mobile web user segment. eMarketer anticipates mobile social networking will enjoy 46.8 percent CAGR between 2008 and 2014, increasing from 76 million worldwide users to 760.1 million during that seven-year stretch–by 2014, 13.3 percent of all global mobile subscribers will access social media sites.

via 2009 Year in Review: Social networking dominates the mobile web – FierceMobileContent.

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