There's Twitter, Velvet Puffin, now Peekamo. Social networking moving to the mobile. Making SMS a social medium. Interesting trend to watch.

It appears that any device with enough computing power that commands human interaction is a prime candidate for the social web. This makes the mobile phone the obvious next choice. In fact, I feel that it is the obvious best choice for Web 2.0 since the mobile phone is more personal and more ubiquitous.

However nice a platform it is, these creators of social platforms have to realise that the only two services that have taken off on the mobile platform are voice calls and SMS. Personally, I check Gmail and read Google Reader feeds on my tiny Motorola L7, but I'm sure the majority don't. That leave very little room for communication if relied on the basic mobile services.

Twitter's amazing success is possibly because it leveraged the simple yet widely used SMS system whereas little is heard of VelvetPuffin where an application has to be installed and works only on specific phones.

But this may change soon. The latest buzz in the mobile phone space is, strangely, not about phones. The Apple iPhone and the Nokia N95 are being positioned as mobile computers that do a variety of multimedia functions. The iPhone evolved from the iPod music player, while the N95 possibly took some R&D from the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet.

If these two devices do take off, it'll mark a milestone in mobile phone evolution and a beginning of true mobile computing. With that, things could change for app installed social networks or give a sudden boost to the traffic of the web-based oldies.

So I guess the networking guys were right, we do need IPv6. ;-)