Opera’s new State of the Mobile Web report for December 2009, with a special section on social networks, shows MocoSpace as one of the top and fastest growing social networks in the US:

I’ve been working with the Mobile Web for 10 years now, and I can tell you there are a number of things that those new to this world would find shocking if they were to catch wind of them. A few examples …

First, there’s a recent AP story documenting an account switching incident involving Facebook users on AT&T. The culprit? Mis-configured gateways on AT&T’s network caused users private data, stored as browser cookies, to get mixed up, giving some people access to accounts that don’t belong to them. This is not the first time such a thing has happened, in fact we’ve seen it on nearly every major wireless network in North America. It can take carriers weeks, and in some cases months to identify these situations and address them. On a related subject, cookie support in general can be somewhat sketchy, with things like expiration times not being honored or data just disappearing.

Next we have frequent outages, either full, such as the recent incident involving T-Mobile Sidekick handsets, or partial as seems to happen every so often on Blackberry’s network. Outages on the Mobile Web are far more common, and often far longer in duration, than outages at major wired ISPs, with the carriers often never acknowledging such incidents to their customers or partners.

Then there are the transcoders. Many of the major networks use them in an attempt to make PC Websites accessible on less capable mobile browsers. This sounds great, however they often cause sites which are made for the Mobile Web to render improperly, or worse, make them completely unusable. In some cases the carrier may have a white list of Mobile Web sites that should bypass the transcoder, leaving it to the site owners to submit a request to be included. In others, there may be no white list and so other workarounds must be sought.

In short, those who only develop for the PC Web don’t know how lucky they are

Very interesting to see Ground Truth, a new mobile analytics company, launch today. With insights based on actual traffic rather than surveys or other estimates, the data they’re gathering and analyzing should much more accurately reflect real usage and trends on the Mobile Web.

And lo-and-behold, they’re finding that half of the most popular Mobile Web sites today are mobile-oriented content and services, proving the Mobile Web is not just a miniaturized mirror of the online Internet, but a new, distinct medium with its own defining characteristics.

Top 10 Mobile Web Sites *
First week of 2010 (January 4-10, 2010)
(Ranked by total Page Views)

1. MySpace
2. Facebook
3. Google
4. Mocospace
5. FunForMobile
6. AirG
7. Yahoo!
8. Cellufun
9. Mbuzzy
10. Myxer

* Not including pages served by operator portals

2010 has started off with a bang for us. MocoSpace membership has been climbing on both Web and mobile with our traffic on iPhone and Android devices growing at an even faster clip.  We have been recording new records across all metrics. We are now generating over 100 million pageviews a day.  What does that mean? It means nearly a million people a day are on MocoSpace spending over 40 million minutes on the site.  Our members are spending 650,000+ hours a day finding new friends, connecting with old ones, sharing photos, sending ecards, playing games, and more!

We’ve spent the last 4 years building our team and our product, and we’ve come a long way.  However, I can say with certainty that in many ways we are just getting started building our business.  It is going to be a very exciting couple of years as mobile goes mainstream.

I was very happy to stumble upon the following post from one of the thousands of artists we have on MocoSpace, using it as a platform for their music to reach and engage their fans through mobile!

“The purpose of this thread is to help other artists grow their fan base. I can’t teach you how to expand it on myspace (seeing how I haven’t mastered it), but I can show you other great ways of doing so.

If you’re not on mocospace.com, I suggest you get an account. Don’t worry it’s free just like Myspace. The reason why I like Moco is because it’s not overpopulated like myspace, you receive no to minimum junk mail and spam, and people actually chat and network on there.

The best part about it is, being a featured music artist. Once they approve your account as a music artist, you can upload up to 11 songs to your profile. You’re probably thinking “Big deal”. Well, what moco has, that myspace doesn’t have… is the option to listen and download songs to your phone. That’s where the fans come in.

Using their phone’s web browser, they can download your song to their phone, set your song as their ringtone, and even add your song to their page (which increases your chances of others playing your song from their page as well).

I have been utilizing mocospace (as far as my music goes) since April and It has helped me to gain more fans and exposure. I’ve had people message me and tell me that they have my song as a ringtone and other people overheard the song and liked it as well. So you pretty much understand the snowball effect of it all.

To understand what I’m talking about, visiting my mocospace page from your phone’s web browser at http://www.Mocospace.com/stud2unique4u and click the play button next to a song and the song will download to your phone.”

Dat Stud Rapper, K-Don, TAYLOR, Michigan, US

The original post is here

We recently completed launch of the MocoSpace Mobile Advertising Platform! MocoSpace is among the most engaging mobile sites in the world, with our over 10 million users spending an average of 25 minutes per day on the site from their phones. We store a wealth of demographic and behavioral data and are able to serve highly targeted, relevant mobile campaigns to just about any audience, including targeting by:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Wireless Carrier
• Handset
• Ethnicity
• Language

In addition, the platform features advanced campaign management, including frequency capping, vertical content targeting as well as highly integrated and engaging beyond the banner placements including integration with campaigns on the MocoSpace desktop Web site.

As has been reported by some others, we’ve seen a big upsurge in traffic from smartphones and the iPod touch in particular since the holidays. Seems it was a popular gift this year, and people are finding the mobile Internet experience quite compelling. The touch now accounts for nearly 2% of our traffic, making it one of the top 10 devices on MocoSpace, more than any other Wifi enabled non-phone device. The next most popular Wifi non-phone device? The Sony PSP. Though not to the extent of the iPod touch, the PSP has also seen a nice uptick since the holidays and is just a few spots shy of the iPod touch on our overall list of top devices.

Although feature (non-smart) phones represent the lion’s share of the over 2 billion page views/month we see at MocoSpace, smartphones are a quickly growing slice of that. And we’ve just seen something very interesting. For the first time, Android’s share of MocoSpace site traffic has eclipsed that from the iPhone.

We now see more users with Android phones, consuming more pages, than the iPhone. Android users consume over 10% more Pages/Visit, with 15% more time spent on site. The T-Mobile G1, currently the most widely sold Android phone in the US, is one of the top ten most frequently used phones on MocoSpace, and represents an even higher share of pages consumed.

Android still has a long way to go before it can claim the top smartphone platform spot from Blackberry, where we see the majority of Smartphone traffic today, but it has a very bright future. In fact I’m dying to get my hands on the new Verizon Droid, but I can’t help but share concerns over the looming fragmentation issues on the horizon.

AOL announced its top search terms today here, and MocoSpace was one of the top 5 search terms for mobile.  I think that this is great for us, but for the mobile Internet space as well.  It validates my founding belief that the mobile Internet is and will be different then the Internet.  The winners will come from both PC-based Internet sites and from pure play mobile sites such as MocoSpace, Admob, Medio and the like.

We’ve been working with Def Jam recently to bring some incredible artists to the MocoSpace audience. Recently, we had hip hop legends Nas and LL Cool J take questions from Moco’ers in live interviews, as well as live performances from new artists including Karina! The community loves it and the artists are getting their music out there. Check it out if you haven’t done already.

Justin & Nas