A growing number of mobile phone subscribers worldwide are taking online social networking to the streets. The U.K. leads Europe in mobile social networking on a percentage basis — with the U.S. boasting comparable numbers. In the U.K., approximately 810,000 mobile subscribers, or 1.7% of all mobile subscribers in the country, visited social networking websites on their mobile phones in the first quarter of 2008. That reach percentage was twice as high as it was in other major European markets?though similar to the U.S., where 1.6% of all mobile subscribers (4.1 million in all) accessed social networks via their phones in December 2007.

In the U.S., MySpace.com, the leading social networking site among PC users is also the most popular mobile Internet social networking site. The site logged 2.8 million unique mobile users in December 2007. Also in December, Facebook, which has the second largest audience among social networking sites, had 1.8 million unique mobile users. In contrast, Facebook led mobile social networking sites in the U.K. with 557,000 unique mobile users per month in Q1 2008, while MySpace followed with 211,000 unique mobile users. While Facebook and MySpace.com were also among the top social networking sites in other European countries during the first quarter of 2008, MSN’s Windows Live Spaces led in Italy (154,000 unique mobile users per month) and France (106,000), and ranked second in Germany (45,000) behind MySpace, which boasted 52,000 unique mobile users per month. Social networking is already a global phenomenon, and going mobile is the next big thing. In the U.K and the U.S. already see millions of users of MySpace.com, Facebook and other social networks interacting with their virtual spaces while they’re on the go. Consumer demand for mobile social networking may be a significant driver of mobile service pricing models as evidenced by Vodafone UK’s recent move to offer unlimited Internet access as a standard feature of its new monthly mobile price plans.

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I thought I had the social network angle all covered with my Facebook profile, Linkedin profile, Plaxo, my website and a blog. But then I noticed people “Twittering” and “Zanneling” through my Facebook updates and I was intrigued. What were these new strange verbs, I thought?

So I went over to www.twitter.com and www.zannel.com and I looked around.

What I found was people of all ages, all across the globe sharing their lives in bite size bits — sharing web pages, photos, news stories and conversations being overheard. More bits sharing ideas, new product launches, videos, bookmarks and slideshows. Even more bits with moments of the mundane, the sad and the peculiar.

Then I dug a little more and found that there are many more sites with strange names, encouraging people to share their interests, loves, hates and lives. Some of the sites share information with other sites. They create a daisy chain effect where, for instance, I can Zannel a new video of the woodpecker harassing me during my conference calls, and it will feed the link to my Twitter account, which then feeds Plaxo and Facebook.

But what if you wanted to share and collect all the information on all your friends regardless of which site they are using?

Enter FriendFeed. (www.friendfeed.com) FriendFeed enables me to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that my friends and family are sharing. It automatically imports shared stuff from a list of 35+ social-oriented sites across the web.

The list of sites that feed into the service includes popular photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Picasa web albums and Smugmug; video sharing sites including YouTube, Vimeo and Seesmic, and even online radio services like Pandora and Last.fm. In fact, pretty much anything you want to share with others can be fed into FriendFeed.

Here’s what I learned today from my friends on FriendFeed: Xerox is getting out of the copier business. Robert Scoble has 25 stickers on the side of his Mac. A company named Infectious is offering custom art to personalize the outside of your car. I also found out Marcus needs more sleep.

So what do all these little updates and tidbits mean to me?

Well, last week I removed Fox News from my home page feeds because the “news” they report is never new. It feeds on the downtrodden, the mentally ill and the foibles and tragedies of mankind. I had enough.

With FriendFeed, I get news that my friends think are interesting in their lives and the lives of others — the people I share with and follow provide updates on things they are building, investing in and caring about. They provide a vision into the goodness of this world that seems to have lost its way in mass media. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather spend my day being fed a healthy diet of optimism.

It’s good to have friends.

Feel Free to Join My Networks! LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | FriendFeed | Zannel

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