Hi5 socializing for mobiles

The difference between Hi5.com's social-network site for the cellphone screen and those of MySpace and Facebook, CNET points out, is that Hi5's mobile edition 1) "openly targets" people around the world who primarily use mobile phones, not computers, to socialize, and 2) launched in 26 languages. CNET says Facebook and MySpace's mobile editions are designed more as supplements to their Web browser-accessed sites. Point No. 1 above makes particular sense for Hi5's Latin American market, if comScore's international social-networking data is to be believed. ComScore's recently unveiled data showed a 1,055% increase in traffic for Hi5 between June 2007 and this past June. Here's my summary of the comScore report. Here, too, is some context on the growing MoSoSo, or mobile-social-networking, phenomenon from the Christian Science Monitor.

Facebook's 'Twitter' traits

Facebook users now have all the cellphone-Web "talking points" that the very hot mobile-social-networking service Twitter has, a Wired News blog reports. Users can not only update their profiles via cellphone, they can also have their Facebook friends' pokes and comments sent directly to their phones. Wired News says "the improvements are not simply a case of Facebook copying Twitter since the Status Updates feature has been available to Facebook users for nearly a year, still, with the addition of SMS support, the featureset is now nearly identical to that of Twitter."