Social networking among fastest internet trends

Social networking has become one of the fastest-growing Internet trends of the past two years.

According to Internet metrics firm Comscore, Facebook saw users increase 270% from June last year to June this year. It now has more than 52 million users worldwide.

MySpace registered lower growth of 72% but still leads the market with 114 million users. Bebo, with a majority of users in Europe, grew 172% to more than 18 million users.

Now mobile phone companies are after the social networking sites.

The mobile phone companies reckon the people who are using sites like Facebook are exactly the sort of people likely to be interested in using the Internet on a mobile phone.

Revenues from putting user-generated content - i.e: content such as videos and blogs created by consumers rather than media organisations - onto mobile phones is expected to rise more than tenfold over the next five years, according to estimates by Juniper Research published yesterday.