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Social networking sites like Facebook are increasingly offering the same applications found in Yahoo!, but the latter's executives argue this will not drive away its users.

Instead, top Yahoo! executives, who held a short briefing with local media in a visit to Manila, stressed that the company is in fact embracing social networking as it introduces new features in tools like Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail.

"Does it make sense to reinvent the wheel inside social networking services? Or do we take such services and instead integrate them into Yahoo!?," answered Scott Dietzen, Yahoo! senior vice president for global communications products.

"I believe it is much easier for us to embrace new forms of social networking than the other way around," Dietzen added, when asked by INQUIRER.net whether Yahoo! feels threatened by social networks like Facebook.

Yahoo! has been criticized many times by analysts for getting left behind in the social networking train. Two years ago, it announced a billion-dollar bid for then-emerging social networking site Facebook but was thwarted.

eMarketer forecasts that mobile social networking will grow from 82 million users in 2007 to over 800 million worldwide by 2012.

"This population will comprise current online social networkers who are extending their digital lives to mobile as well as a growing number of mobile-only social networkers," said John du Pre Gauntt, eMarketer senior analyst and co-author of the new report, Mobile Social Networks. "Early reports suggest strong user demand for mobile social networks."

For example, MySpace recorded over 7 million unique visitors to MySpace Mobile in the US in the six months since launch. "It wasn't until we rolled out m.myspace.com that we got a sense of how powerful demand was for MySpace on cell phones," Brandon Lucas, senior director of mobile business development for MySpace, told eMarketer.

If Slide and RockYou, two of the fastest-growing Web businesses, are any barometer for the future, the Internet is going to look pink. In other words, the future of social media is going to be all about the women. So if you're going to create the next hot Web 2.0 site and you want it to go viral, you'll target women.

It's no shock that men and women act differently online, just as they do in everyday life. The Web is an extremely social medium, and Web 2.0 is all about being social. Traditionally, men are the early adopters of new technologies. But when it comes to social media, women are at the forefront. At Rapleaf we conducted a study of 13.2 million people and how they're using social media. While the trends indicate both sexes are using social media in huge numbers, our findings show that women far outpace the men.

Social networking sites need to be concerned about the proliferation of spam and phishing attacks and the impact it could have on their ability to grow and retain members.