MSNBC has a useful warning about social networking sites: focus on one or two, or you'll get overloaded.

"In researching this column," contributor Eve Tahmincioglu wrote, "I signed up for as many of the networks out there as I could and what did I get? A headache."

It certainly seems like everyone in the tech industry has an idea for a new social networking company these days. That's even more true on mobile. But all you end up with, aside from a plethora of logins and organizational challenges, is a bunch of walled-garden networks where it's difficult to connect to everyone.

continued...

Here's a question that's on a lot of pundits' minds: what effect will cell phones have on social networking platforms? For Facebook, that question is particularly sharp, given the company's own Application Platform—and the latent potential of location-based mobile social networking.

As Josh Lowensohn wrote on WebWare, "[One year later] the Facebook platform is alive and well, but the hot new platform is the iPhone. People are lining up for hours to get their hands on one, and developers see dollars in those lines: Unlike with Facebook apps, you can charge for iPhone software, and developers keep 70 percent of the money collected through Apple's app store."

continued...

Microblogging site Twitter has acquired the Summize search engine, according to TechCrunch. The report said that the size of the transaction wasn't disclosed, although it was paid for mostly in stock; Twitter has also hired 5 of the 6 Summize employees, while Summize's founder Jay Verdy will move on to a new project.

The report said that the five Summize employees joining Twitter are all engineers, which will add to the twelve engineers currently working at Twitter. (It's amazing how small some of these big-news tech companies actually are.)

Alltel has launched version 6.0 of JuiceCaster, the mobile social networking app that lets users send pictures and videos from their phones to MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Photobucket, and some other sites.

JuiceCaster 6.0 lets users post video status updates from their phones to Facebook and Twitter. It also lets non-members subscribe to a JuiceCaster member's status updates—a critical feature, since walled garden approaches are doomed to failure on cell phones.

The new version also allows the creation of video sharing groups, bookmarking integration with Digg and De.li.cious, and the ubiquitous mobile video blog post feature. JuiceCaster 6.0 costs $1.99 for a one-day pass, $3.99 per month, or $9.99 for a three-month pass.

New numbers from Hitwise show that while much of the activity on Twitter takes place via mobile, the traffic to the website has continued to grow substantially, MediaPost reports. In fact, visits were up 500% for the week ending July 5, 2008 compared to the same week last year.

The report said that despite user complains about outages, Twitter has remained the most popular among the micro-blogging services. "Last week, the traffic for Twitter was 12 times higher than the total traffic for up-and-coming rival Plurk, and 24 times higher than FriendFeed"—two places where some users had migrated during Twitter outages, according to Hitwise.

MySpace Russia has partnered with Russian mobile operator MTS to provide direct access to the social network's mobile site from the MTS mobile homepage. The duo also intends to put an MTS-branded community on the MySpace Russia site "to drive usage and support the partnership," Cellular-news reports.

The deal is a "key strategic move for MySpace, allowing us to give Russian customers unprecedented access to networking via their mobile phones," MySpace Russia general director Alekxandr Turkot said of the partnership.

Silicon Alley Insider has a plan for Twitter: it should become a mobile PayPal.

"Twitter should take full advantage of their messaging platform, user base and user disposition to lead in the mobile payments space, where, despite years of hype, no one has much of a head start," the site said.

The report said that while Twitter is far from being a ubiquitous mobile platform, they have more penetration and usage than any other mobile service—in fact, their current user base is the same kind of early adopter group that frequented PayPal in the beginning.

"If Twitter had a P2P payments system in place today, it would become the most used mobile payments system overnight. Having the ability to send a message like "p innonate $5" for that beer I just bought you would integrate seamlessly with the way Twitter's users already interact with their system." Food for thought.

Whrrl, the mobile social networking and discovery service from Pelago, has added support for a number of handsets, including the BlackBerry World 8830, several flavors of the Motorola RAZR and the Samsung M610. Support for the iPhone is coming soon, the company promised.

The free service, which already worked on the BlackBerry Pearl and Curve and the Nokia N95, combines social networking, local discovery and user-generated content with mapping and micro-blogging to help find something to do or a place to go based on user ratings and where their friends are. New enhancements even let users plot their friends' locations on the Whrrl map and drill down on the map to specific areas or criteria.

Whrrl is available to mobile users across the US, but it currently has "deep" location and event content for only a handful of major cities including Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, New York, Austin, Miami and a few others.

Mobile social network MocoSpace is crowing that it now has three million registered users. The news follows on the heels of the Boston-based start-up being ranked as the third most-trafficked mobile site in the US after MySpace and Google, according to stats from mobile browser company Opera Software.

Not bad for a company that, according to co-founder Jamie Hall, has grown largely by word-of-mouth.

One of the first made-for-mobile social communities to start life as an off-deck service, MocoSpace has a different feel than most other social networks, something Hall believes works to its advantage. MocoSpace users flock to the site to keep in touch with their friends wherever they are. The major emphasis is on communication, and it offers plenty of ways to communicate - IM, chat, e-mail, messaging, blogging, e-forums and even e-cards.

MocoSpace is a totally open community whose users tend to skew younger (ages 17-23) and urban. They're also quite active on the site, generating more than 1.5 billion page views a month with the average member visiting the site more than once a day.

Hall told us that the company has no plans to jump into the location-based services craze, something he believes works much better in more "closed" communities. It seems to us that if three million users are generating 1.5 billion page views every month on the site, then they're probably telling their friends where to find them anyway, without needing the help of a GPS locator.

Microsoft is buying MobiComp, a Portuguese software maker specializing in mobile data backup tools. According to RCR Wireless News, the software giant is more interested in the start-up's technology that lets consumers post content from their mobile phones to the Web, specifically social networks. Speculation is that the MobiComp software will be integrated into Windows Live.

Financial terms weren't disclosed.