(15 May 2008 6:00 pm)

MUMBAI: A growing number of mobile phone subscribers worldwide are taking online social networking to the streets, research conducted by Nielsen reveals.

The findings, released by Nielsen Mobile, a service of Nielsen show that the UK leads Europe in mobile social networking on a percentage basis -- with the US boasting comparable numbers.

In the UK, approximately 810,000 mobile subscribers, or 1.7 per cent of all mobile subscribers in the country, visited social networking websites on their mobile phones in the first quarter of 2008.

That reach percentage was twice as high as it was in other major European markets - though similar to the US, where 1.6 percent of all mobile subscribers (4.1 million in all) accessed social networks via their phones in December 2007.

In the US, MySpace.com, the leading social networking site among PC users, is also the most popular mobile Internet social networking site. The site logged 2.8 million unique mobile users in December 2007.

Also in December, Facebook, which has the second largest audience among social networking sites, had 1.8 million unique mobile users. In contrast, Facebook led mobile social networking sites in the UK with 557,000 unique mobile users per month in Q1 2008, while MySpace followed with 211,000 unique mobile users.

While Facebook and MySpace.com were also among the top social networking sites in other European countries during the first quarter of 2008, MSN's Windows Live Spaces led in Italy (154,000 unique mobile users per month) and France (106,000), and ranked second in Germany (45,000) behind MySpace, which boasted 52,000 unique mobile users per month.

Nielsen Mobile VP mobile media Jeff Herrmann says, " Social networking is already a global phenomenon, and going mobile is the next big thing. In the UK and the US especially, we already see millions of users of MySpace.com, Facebook and other social networks interacting with their virtual spaces while they're on the go. Consumer demand for mobile social networking may be a significant driver of mobile service pricing models as evidenced by Vodafone UK's recent move to offer unlimited Internet access as a standard feature of its new monthly mobile price plans."