It was announced earlier this week that Facebook achieved their 500M User base worldwide.  In addition, it has been stated that there is about 100M of those users that are accessing Facebook via their mobile devices ( about 20%).

Moreover, when we look at the opportunity and potential for mobile, the global  market subscriber base has topped 5Billion strong thus indicating that Facebook is still only about 2% of the worlds marketplace for Mobile Social Media (or MoSo).

Repeatedly, Facebook has been one of the most downloaded Applications on the iPhone, Android, and even Blackberry devices with the amazing statistic of over 50% of all usage of content on the mobile tied to social media.   As the mobile experience has also been “coined” to be very location centric, there is another converging category called Mobile Local (or MoLo).   This is tied to Mobile Search and Location Based Services on the go.  As the Geo API has been made available via many application frameworks, it has also been available via certain browsers to bring Location-context to websites and web applications.   Twitter has included a location API recently to  their suite of unique modifiers for Twitter Search and the Geo API has been a strong debate in the developer community surrounding the iPhone in general for location based advertising.

( Picture and Statistics from Hitwise)

So with 98% of the Global Market in the Mobile Social Space and the amazing growth of Mobile Location Based Services, it is apparent that there is a new opportunity for the next Billion Dollar Company in this combined MoSo or MoLo…… or should we say MoSoLo.   The quiet battle ensues between the several mobile location based social networks such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, Socialight,  and a variety of others, but they are still all less then 10M users, thus validating it is early days for MoSoLo.

Creating a compelling experience for end-user’s to “share their location”  for not only their friends but for a unique engagement with brands is now at a very interesting crossroads of growth and evolution to the next killer app ( or massive money making app- mmm ) .   Companies like Nokia, Google, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo have all been putting up billions of  dollars  into this new contest for the next holy grail of advertising and social media, but it seems like  this MoSoLo end-user mind share is with  these new nimble start-ups at this time

Skyhook wireless, a company that has been strong in providing location information as an API for developers,  handset manufactures and Operators had recently released this “heat map” of  real time location interactions.  It will not be long before the heat map itself may be sliced and diced into different behavioral segments for real-time viewing.

Imagine seeing clusters about town of where people that tend to like the same interests or are connected to you are gathering around town at a certain point in time.

So by 2012, I would not be surprised to see a new player, jump out of the blue and take this next wave of MoSoLo or will Facebook be able to take a big chunk of this remaining 98% of the  pie?