Mobile Networking in the US

I just saw this article on emarketer about mobile social networking in the U.S. While mobile social networking has taken off in Asia (not surprising) and in the UK, it's still not a mainstream concept in the US. That said, research suggests that mobile social networking will continue to grow globally:

The article also suggests that teens are a prime target audience for mobile social networking; cell phones are their main means of communicating, and most of them will come of age when social networking is the norm.

Still, I'm skeptical. What I'm wondering is who really has the time to stay so connected? Maybe I'm just too old (at 27!), too corporate, too thinly stretched balancing work, school, and a social life, but I simply can't imagine the time commitment associated with staying in touch with people constantly.

An article I read for a grad school class talked about the cultural rationale for the rise of text messaging in Asia. It claimed that mobile connectivity first came about in Japan because teens rarely had "personal space." Tokyo is a cramped city; text messaging enabled teens to communicate - and have a certain level of autonomy. In the U.S., personal space isn't so much of an issue (well, outside of New York).

Maybe that's why we were so slow to adopt text messaging as a communications method. I'm interested to see if the same cultural concept will influence our uptake of mobile social networking technology. My bet is that mobile is here - and it's only going to get bigger on the social networking front. How quickly we adopt it in the U.S., on the other hand, is harder to call.