Pre featured in USA Today article on mobile social networking

Today’s USA Today featured an article about the mobile internet, specifically how advertisers desperately want to capitalize on the exploding use of the internet on mobile devices. And even more specifically, how to tackle users that access social networking almost exclusively on their phones. While the article repeatedly cites the iPhone and Android as primary targets for advertisers (as they are the biggest share of the new generation of smartphones), all the pictures show our favorite little smartphone: the Palm Pre.

Apart from that fun little bit, the article does point out some interesting statstics, most notably that traffic to social networking sites from smartphones jumped 187% from June to July. Now, the Pre did launch during that timeframe, but then again, so did the iPhone 3GS.

The holy grail of mobile advertising, however, is keeping it local. While that can somewhat be managed with IP addresses on desktop- and lap-bound machines, mobile phones have until recently been much harder to pin down. With the advent of GPS in practically every high-end smartphone, and increasingly in the low end of the spectrum, targeting local advertising onto mobile devices is growing closer to reality every day.

Of course, there are a whole slew of privacy concerns that go along with that, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. In the meantime, we’d like a full-fledged Facebook app to match the impression of social networking prowess that USA Today has bestowed upon the Pre.

Thanks to Matt and Shawn for the tips!