Given the popularity of MySpace in the PC world of social networking, it’s only natural to expect it to be the dominant player in the mobile world. But will it?

There’s no denying MySpace is big. The site passed the 70 million mark in June for active monthly unique users, meaning nearly one in four Americans used MySpace that month, according to comScore MediaMetrix. Nearly 80% of 12- to 17-year-olds use MySpace at least weekly, according to Forrester. And based on M:Metrics’ research, MySpace garnered the most mobile users in the United States and the United Kingdom in June as well.

But several newcomers are digging their heels into the ground. Rather than take an online property and move it to mobile, they’re building social nets for the mobile world from the ground up, with the PC world more of an afterthought. To them, MySpace is a popularity contest. The challengers say their social nets are more personal in nature and therefore more relevant. Question is, can they make it?

VCs are putting their money behind them. Bluepulse, headed by a 25-year-old Australian, raised $6 million from VantagePoint Venture Partners, the same firm that made an early investment in MySpace. The money is helping the company expand into former YouTube offices in Silicon Valley and grow its North American presence.

Boston-based MocoSpace secured $3 million in Series A funding, led by General Catalyst Partners, with additional funding through Pilot Group and former eBay executive Michael Dearing. The funds will support the growth of MocoSpace’s mobile community service.

And SayNow, which is coming at it from a voice perspective, has secured Series A financing of $7.5 million, led by Shasta Ventures. SayNow of Palo Alto, Calif., uses celebrities who record messages for their fans and get them hooked into an ongoing phone community. Artists using Say Now include Foo Fighters, Kenny Chesney and Bobby Valentino.

WHY THE INTEREST? 
There’s a fundamentally different usage and interaction model in the phone-centric world versus the PC-centric world, says Eric Ver Ploeg, managing director at VantagePoint. What bluepulse has done is build a community that is tailored to the mobile users, and “end-users have voted with their feet,” he says. In its beta phase, bluepulse attracted more than 2 million downloads across 150 countries and is closing in on 100 million page views per month.

Based on past industry dynamics, Ver Ploeg says one dominant player likely will emerge along with several niche ones. “The people at MySpace are smart,” as well as the likes of Facebook, he says, and they’ve arranged access to their social networks via the mobile phone; they will attract a fair base. But their chief aim is to direct users back to the online world because that’s where they’ve built their main presence, and that’s not necessarily in the best interest of wireless operators. In the case of bluepulse, “your primary interaction mode is through the phone and everything is built that way,” he says.

The phone, in fact, is more personal than a PC. “You’ve got it with you all the time,” he says, and people will use their phones to meet new friends and to share minutes here and there during the day with the people they already know.

Shawn Conahan, the founder, chairman and CEO of Intercasting, shares a similar philosophy. “The people who really matter to you are the people who go in your PIM [personal information management],” or address book, he says. “The world’s largest social network already exists. It’s called the carriers.”

While the lack of carrier interoperability may appear as a road block for some in the social networking space, techies are finding ways around that. Ben Keighran, the 25-year-old CEO of bluepulse, was a college student studying computer science in Australia when he got his hands on one of the first Ericsson Bluetooth phones. He ended up configuring a setup that allowed him to control the music on his PC by using a cell phone. But he couldn’t share his application with friends, and he set out to create something that others could access without worrying about which carrier or which technology was involved. A former executive of Yahoo! encouraged him to take the platform and try to build a killer app for mobile.

To make it available to a wide audience, however, he had to do it without direct relationships with carriers or handset makers. That platform led to the bluepulse social networking tool. That’s not to say Keighran is against working directly with carriers in the future, but it was the only way he could see to get the job done quickly.

A common thread between MySpace, which started as a subsidiary of Intermix Media before being acquired by News Corporation in 2005, and bluepulse is understanding the need for fast cycles of iteration, according to Ver Ploeg. The approach at MySpace was “let’s put it up” and find out what users like and don’t like, he says. Being quick to adapt to end-users’ desires made MySpace successful where some others were not. Bluepulse is similar, he says. Keighran has a vision of what people want, but he’s not religiously stuck to that view, Ver Ploeg adds.

DIFFERENT STROKES
Like bluepulse, MocoSpace’s users have come primarily by word of mouth rather than any large-scale advertising. Justin Siegel, CEO of MocoSpace, co-founded the company with Jamie Hall; the two have been friends since elementary school. When they founded MocoSpace, the executives, who sold a prior mobile gaming company, JSmart Technologies, to SkyZone Entertainment, saw three trends, Siegel says. The U.S. mobile Internet market was poised to become more mainstream; companies like Third Screen Media were making advertising a viable revenue model; and online community sites were taking off.

Now, MocoSpace’s demographic is trending younger than the audience for online social networking. “It’s a different user in the sense that our users are not only younger but mobile is more central to their world,” Siegel explains. The company’s philosophy is to take a mobile-centric view, even going so far as to assume the users don’t have PCs.

While being on a carrier deck has its advantages, it also can have disadvantages. The billing model, for example, typically calls for accessing sites and products for a fee each day or by the month. “We’re entirely ad supported as a business model, and that’s something we think is really important,” Siegel says. “Our goal is to just build a great community product where they feel they can stay connected with friends.”

Some mobile social networking initiatives are not as focused on data. SayNow is trying to build communities around core passions, such as music, and put celebrities at the center of it. SayNow assigns a phone number to a celebrity, and the celebrity mentions the number at an appearance, on posters or the Web.

The celebrity can record voice messages for fans, send text messages or even call a fan directly. When a fan calls the phone number, they’re subscribed to the artist’s phone community.

The motivation behind SayNow was not to avoid carriers – its product actually can contribute a lot to voice minutes – but a byproduct of its strategy is the company doesn’t have to port to hundreds of different phone models or create relationships with individual carriers. “We wanted to be universal,” says Ujjwal Singh, SayNow’s CTO, and that meant narrowing the scope to primarily phone calls and text. “We are very carrier friendly.”

“Every person since the age of 4 knows what to do with phone numbers,” says SayNow CEO Nikhyl Singhal. “It doesn’t require any training.” Entertainers benefit by generating more excitement around their offerings, and even though they all have a Web presence, fans find they are not very authentic. “When they get a call from one of our artists, it’s always genuine; you can hear the person’s voice. That personality comes through,” Singhal says.

A lot of the buzz for SayNow is generated through MySpace, where artists will sometimes post their SayNow-dedicated phone numbers. The service has been successful in driving awareness of new music, ringtones, tours and merchandise, Singhal says. Some artists are even using SayNow to give sneak previews of upcoming tracks.

MOBILE VS. PC
Although some contend that PC-centric sites are merely using mobile to drive business back to the online world, that’s not the case for Six Apart, which owns Live Journal and Vox, says Andrew Anker, executive vice president of corporate development. “We do see mobile as critically important and have made a large investment,” he says, adding the company is prepared for users to interact with its sites with only a cell phone.

Besides working with Intercasting, the company partnered with Nokia on its N Series phones for posting directly to Vox, and it promotes the sharing of photos from cameraphones. “We have a lot more in the works,” Anker says. When people say the mobile phone is a low-level device on which they can do only a small subset of things that are done in the PC world, he says, “we don’t see the world that way.”

The mobile phone lowers the barriers to blogging and personal expression, moving it from text to video, picture or audio. “We answer the question, ‘Why do I want a great camera on my phone?’,” he says, adding that a lot of people to this day have cameras on their phones and no idea what to do with them. A lot of people also have no desire to sit down and type a message, but with pictures, they can quickly communicate with others, either publicly or privately. “We want to make it as simple as possible,” he says.

Industry insiders say it’s too soon to say social networking will be bigger on mobile phones than PCs. Many pieces are involved – carriers, manufacturers, Websites, vendors – and they all need to work well with one another. On the data side, mobile data service plans are still considered expensive and come with bandwidth limitations.

Over the next two years, the industry likely will see a combination of launches, some with existing Web-based players and others with mobile-only communities. And operators will recognize the PIM is the gateway, Conahan predicts. Two years ago, it was almost a foregone conclusion that MySpace would own the mobile social networking space. Now, that appears to be a risky assumption. In terms of mobile social networking, “we’re maybe not in the eye of the storm, but we’re definitely in the storm,” he says.