Mobile social networking

via cellphone, mobile chat rooms let users interact with people of similar interests, for example snowboarding or local bands. It’s different from sending a text message to someone you know, as messages in chat rooms appear on the cellphones of all users in that particular room.

Companies that offer mobile chat services include AirG, PowerChat and Upoc. Upoc uses text messaging to blast messages to others that have joined a chatroom about a particular topic, such as NBA Basketball. According to a recent survey, 36,000 people in the Denver area logged into an AirG chat room during a single week in January. AirG is a Vancouver, British Columbia-based designer and developer of mobile chat rooms.

Users spend an average 59 minutes each day chatting — on and off — on the AirG network, said Fred Ghahramani, founder and CEO of AirG. More than 70 per cent of the company’s chatters are between the ages of 18 and 29. “A large number of those people are in the service industry or students who don’t sit in front of a PC all day,” Ghahramani said. “It may not be OK to talk on the phone while at work, but it’s totally acceptable to text into a phone.”

When entering a chat room developed by AirG, users can create a profile, which can include a photo. After locating friends or making new ones through the service, users instant message each other privately, or join a number of interest-based “lounges” to chat with multiple users about various subjects. Examples of lounges include “West Coast,” “Hip-Hop,” and “Singles 30,” for singles over age 30.

AirG was founded six years ago, long before data connections were standard on cellphones. “It took us five years to get 5 million users, and eight months to get from 5 million to 10 million users,” Ghahramani said.

Popular online-based social networking sites that let users blog and upload photos, videos and music now offer the functionality to let users keep in touch with their online communities while on the go. MySpace is a prime example, along with Flickr, a photo-sharing website. Flickr lets users snap photos with a camera phone and immediately send the photo to a blog.

Some services, such as one offered by Broomfield, Colo.-based Useful Networks, incorporate GPS technology to alert users to where their friends are through a mapping programme that is easily accessed from a cell phone.

Currently, Dodgeball is a service that has a similar offering, but relies on users to send a text message to alert others to their location. AT&T, formerly Cingular, recently introduced a partnership with social networking giant MySpace.com to allow users to easily view and upload information to pages seamlessly from their phones.

“It’s real important to us because we’ve been building more capabilities over the last few years,” said Jennifer Bowcock, director for consumer media relations for AT&T. “We want to take the chat experience from the PC to the wireless phone.”