MySpace and Research In Motion have teamed up to develop a MySpace Mobile application for BlackBerry handsets. It’s due to be available later this year, and will let you access your MySpace profile and contacts on the go, while also using push messaging to get updates to your BlackBerry.
It’s good news for heavy MySpace users, albeit some time behind rival Facebook, whose similar BlackBerry app has been around for a long time now. However, it seems RIM and MySpace will be working together in other ways, such as making a BlackBerry “community page” on MySpace where users will be able to get news, content, videos, games, ringtones and skins for their device.
MySpace is certainly keen on the mobile side of its business. The company says it now gets more than two million daily visitors to its WAP site. The interesting thing in terms of BlackBerry, however, would be if MySpace made it possible to stream music from band profiles to your phone, bringing in that side of the website, rather than just the social networking elements.
Well, analysts always say everything is set to explode, in the full knowledge that they won’t be picked up on it in five years time if it doesn’t. So ABI Research is eagerly predicting that location-based mobile social networking will be generating $3.3 billion of revenues by 2013 from a mixture of advertising and subscriptions.
UK-based mobile social network 
The Sidekick messaging devices haven’t had as high a profile here in the UK as in the US, although T-Mobile is now selling the very attractive Sidekick Slide, which should change that. Not least because it’s just got a new MySpace Mobile application, providing push access to the social network. Push? Yep: you can access messages, comments, friend requests and other info, and get automatic alerts pop up to tell you when new messages arrive, rather than have to log in to check them. There’s also one-button uploading of photos to your profile, and the ability to edit your profile from the Sidekick. Oh, and the app is free to use, too. If you have a Sidekick, you can download it from the community folder of the handset’s Catalogue menu. It’s certainly a neat idea, and is comparable to the dedicated Facebook application for BlackBerry devices that was launched last year. Actually, that’s our only quibble with the Sidekick news - it’d be nice to have similar apps for Facebook and Bebo available for the Slide…
Within the mobile industry, there’s a big debate going on at the moment around mobile social networking. In particular, it’s about who’s going to make big bucks from it: the existing online social networks (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo) or mobile startups? And equally importantly (if you’re an operator), how are the mobile operators going to grab some of that cash for themselves?There’s an 
