There are a couple of interesting announcements this week on mobile social networking.

INQ (part of Hutchinson) announced a phone that offers a tight integration with Facebook. I had the chance to see an early demo and really liked what I saw. Will have more to say once I get the chance to play with one.

There were some rumors around Motorola building an "Android Social Networking" phone. See this link from Fierce.

Yahoo! announced some cool functionality at CTIA around integration of your contact list with social networking features/services. The iPhone application is really well done.

I think all of these announcements are showing us early glimpses of where the cell phone and communication experiences are headed. On one hand, they give me many different ways to interact with my network on Facebook. I have applications. There are aggregators.

More interesting though is whether or not we need a separate application if the features/functionality are inherent in how the cell phone is designed and used? If my cell phone has my contacts and knows my network, why can't we build from there?

More later.

Wrote this report this summer to answer many of the questions raised.

I think social networking has the potential to drive a tremendous amount of data services on cell phones. Ping me if you have a company working in this space - I'm interested to hear what other cool stuff is out there.