By Tarmo Virki

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Nokia plans to build social networking technology acquired with U.S. firm Twango into its key S60 software, enabling it to bring community features faster to a wide range of phones, a company official said.

The world's top cell phone maker, Nokia, announced in July the deal to buy Twango -- a service which allows users to share photos, video or audio files -- as it bets on a take-off of cell phone versions of hugely popular social networking sites.

"We are going to integrate it with our S60 platform," Stephen Johnston, senior business development manager at Nokia, said in a speech to a trade fair in Helsinki.

When asked about social networking and the role of communities in Nokia's future, he said: "It's really going to be the underlying layer, across everything."

Nokia hopes mobile social networking sites -- which allow increasing swathes of the world's population to keep in touch with friends online -- will eventually encourage people to use the Internet on their cell phones with as much enthusiasm as they do on computers.

"Its seems that for many, virtual communities are the closest ones," Jorma Ollila, Nokia's chairman, said at the fair.

Last week, Nokia unveiled a new music store and gaming service, and said it would wrap them with a navigation offering into an Internet service platform under the new brand "Ovi," a Finnish word for "door."

"In the future the services will certainly expand. It is open, so it offers opportunity also for other service developers," Ollila said.

Nokia's S60 software platform is used extensively in Nokia's line-up of mid- to high-end phones, but also in advanced handsets of LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics.

Its closest rival is Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

MARKET SURGE AHEAD

Revenues from running networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo on cell phones are expected to rise sharply in coming years as so-called "user-generated content," once a niche concept, starts to win mass appeal.

Juniper Research expects annual revenues from wireless social networking to increase to 2.86 billion euros in 2012, compared with just 190 million euros this year.

"It is very early days. Mass social networking is a very recent phenomenon. People haven't yet worked out how to monetize it in the fixed world," said Windsor Holden, principal analyst at Juniper.

Holden said smaller players or new companies have a window of opportunity of 18 to 24 months to build communities.

"In a couple of years this market place will be crowded by your MySpaces and Facebooks. The opportunity is there because people carry a phone around all the time," Holden said.

Vodafone, the world's largest cell phone company by revenue, in February clinched a deal with media group Myspace owner News Corp that allows customers to post profiles, videos and blogs on a cell phone version of MySpace.

But smaller companies like Munich-based Gofresh, which runs the itsmy.com mobile social networking site with 550,000 users, expects forays by Internet sites into the mobile space to fail.

"Can online companies move to mobile? We have learned -- definitely not. There is no PC company which would be leading in the mobile space," said Antonio Vince Staybl, one of the co-heads of Gofresh. "People always look for new stuff and the new stuff is mobile."

(Additional reporting by Kirstin Ridley in London)
Copyright 2007 Reuters.

Photo:
Twango logo. Nokia bought Twango in July.