[Research Report] Mobile Social Networking - Gold Rush, Goldmine, or Minefield? - The mobile social networking market is best described as emerging. With a very large number of startups and unformed business models shaped loosely around Internet-based equivalents, the mobile social networking industry has a long way to go before it reaches maturity and mass adoption. Nonetheless, mobile social networks are garnering a great deal of interest from mobile operators, hardware vendors, ISPs, and major brands, as a means of connecting users, reducing churn, enabling advertising revenues, and facilitating access to other forms of mobile content.

This report aims to demystify some of the key issues around mobile social networking, through a combination of up-to-the-minute analysis of the major stakeholders in the mobile social networking value chain, interviews with providers of social networking and mobile operators, an in-depth survey of end-users’ perceptions of mobile social networking, and forecasting of mobile social networking uptake in terms of subscribers and revenues.