Many young people are obsessed with two things: social networking and their mobile phones. Location services and the availability of GPS are the killers to drive up social networking.

Now, GPS technology is adding a new dimension to wireless social-networking services, letting cellphone users find each others’ locations–just as GPS-equipped phones are becoming more prevalent, partly in response to U.S. rules that require carriers to make it easier for emergency officials to locate cellphone users. An estimated 63% of mobile phones sold in North America in 2007 will have GPS or assisted GPS functions, up from 55% of phones sold in 2006, according to market researcher Gartner Research. “The race is just beginning in this area,” says Clint Wheelock, vice president of research for ABI Research.

(..) Once users download the (..) application to their cellphones, and invite and verify their friends, they can click on the application icon to view a map that will display their friends’ locations as green dots. (…) They also can go to another screen to look at messages, or photos, the user’s friends have tagged to their locations.

see my blog for more of the article of Wallstreet Journal Europe