It's no big secret that Mobile 2.0 is ready to take off. Smartphones and PDAs are becoming powerful little computers that we carry in our pocket, and with browsers like Skyfire in development, more attention is being focused on bringing a rich Internet experience to the mobile phone.

So just how much money is the mobile web going to be bringing in? Juniper Research estimates that mobile revenues will reach $22.4 billion by 2013. That's quite a jump from the $5.5 billion in revenues the mobile web currently rakes in.

Much of this growth is based on mobile social networks which will go from an estimated $1.8 billion in revenues this year to $11.2 billion in 2013.

Wordless Wednesday

Other than World of Warcraft, the biggest thing in gaming right now is casual gaming. Stimulated by the popularity of social networks, casual gaming has skyrocketed in the past few years. And, with Facebook becoming a platform for applications, casual gaming on social networks has skyrocketed as well.

The Social Gaming Network (SGN) is looking to become the platform of choice for casual gaming on social networks. In fact, it'd be more accurate to say that it is looking to become the platform-on-a-platform of choice. After all, the SGN's platform is build on Facebook's application platform.

The success of SGN is in reaching out to independent developers to become part of the gaming network. The $15 million investment will be used to provide more tools to these developers and help SGN become the platform of choice for social gaming.

I was recently able to take a tour of the Skyfire mobile web browser, and I must admit, I was very impressed. In fact, even though it is still in beta, it may very well become the primary browser on my AT&T Tilt.

The goal of the Skyfire browser is to rid us of the "mobile internet" and bring the rich, interactive websites we are all used to seeing on our desktop computers to our mobile devices. And it does an excellent job of doing just that. Within minutes of installing the beta on my mobile device, I was watching videos on the YouTube website (the real one, not the mobile one).

Suitably impressed, I rushed over to Widgetbox to check out some arcade widgets. To my delight, Skyfire had no problem displaying the Asteroids widget. Unfortunately, the browser was unable to send the keyboard commands to the widget, so I was unable to play it. According to the people at Skyfire, this will be addressed in a future release, and even just seeing the widget on the page is a big jump forward. I was also able to successfully interact with some widgets that only required mouse clicks.

As for web browsing, Skyfire already does a great job. Other than a rare bug where it allowed me to scroll past the bottom of a website, browsing was amazingly stable. I really liked the zoom in feature where I could tap the screen once, see the box where I am going to zoom in to, and even move this box around before zooming into the website. I could even adjust how much I was going to zoom in by dragging the corner of this box to make it longer or shorter. Alternatively, I could double click and immediately zoom into the page.

From streaming video to Flash applications, Skyfire is shaping up to be just what it promised -- to give mobile users the ability to browse the same rich websites that they browse on their desktop machines.

In other mobile news, Nvidia announced that they will be developing high-powered video chipsets for mobile devices. This spells extra good news on the mobile front as Nvidia plans to make great strides in improving the graphical performance of our mobile devices.

With the introduction of sophisticated browsers like the Skyfire browser and more advanced graphical power, we'll soon be doing away with the idea of a scaled-down mobile Internet and welcoming in the age of Mobile 2.0.

Image of YouTube on the Skyfire Browser

In April, I wrote about how the increasingly niche social networks that keep popping up are putting more pressure on technologies such as OpenSocial that will make keeping up with multiple social networks more manageable.

MySpace, Facebook and Google have each recently made announcements that will help those suffering from social network fatigue.

MySpace announced the Data Availability Initiative that will allow their users to share information with other sites such as Yahoo, Ebay and Twitter. Users will have full control over what information they share and who they share it, and will be able to profile information with new websites that they visit.

On Friday, Facebook announced Facebook Connect on their blog. Through Facebook Connect, users will be able to share their profile information, contacts, photos and other information stored on Facebook.

Adding to this is Google who will soon launch Friend Connect, a set of APIs for OpenSocial that will allow for the sharing of profile information.

With the number of new social networks that pop up each week, the sharing of information will become more important in the future and products like Yoono, a universal remote for social networks, will become a necessity for time management in the social networking age.

Have you ever wanted to build your own web mashup? Last week, I reported on some really cool mashups including some of the best mashups on the web. There is some really great stuff out there like mashups that can help you find the ever-elusive Nintendo Wii or help you to discover new music.

You might think it takes a lot of programming knowledge to build a mashup, but you can actually build a quite functional web mashup without using a lick of code. Now, you probably won't be building anything quite as fancy as Weatherbonk without tossing around a bit of JavaScript, but you can do some neat things such as linking your personal blog to Flickr.

And, thanks to mashup tools like Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly, you can get a surprisingly amount done without needing any programming knowledge. Try it for yourself with these handy tutorials:

• How To Mashup Flickr With Your Blog Using Yahoo Pipes
• Create a Twitter Mashup Using Popfly

For those that do have some programming knowledge that want to learn more about building mashups, you might be interested in learning more about Mapbuilder.

While the intention of Mapbuilder is to allow those without programming knowledge to build their custom Google Maps, the website also allows you to generate the source code for the map. So, if you'd like a good example of interacting with the Google Maps API, Mapbuilder can give it to you.

(Image of Weatherbonk)

The current trend in social networking is diversification and personalization, which is a fancy way of saying that new social networks are popping up that target a niche audience. The upside of this is that these social networks are able to better serve their audience by focusing on a single subject, but the obvious downside is that we, as users, are going to find it more and more difficult to keep up with our social networks.

From MySpace to Facebook to Twitter to Last.FM to LinkedIn and dozens of social networks in between, it can be work simply keeping on top of friend requests and status updates.

That's where Yoono comes in by supplying a universal remote for social networks. Yoono is a web browser plugin currently in beta that will allow users to quickly check up on their favorite social networks through a browser toolbar. This toolbar will give the user a quick status of the social network including friends requests and allows the user to type in a status update and have it automatically update all of their social networks.

After abruptly ending negotiations with Yahoo over the weekend, Microsoft has conducted some informal talks with Facebook about acquiring the social network according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

While the talks haven't been official, they do show that Microsoft is set on acquiring a major addition to their online offerings in order to better compete with the likes of Google. In addition to the talks with Facebook, Microsoft has also made overtures to Myspace owner News Corp. about possible deals.

In the past few months, we have seen a wave of artists start their own social networks from 50 Cent to Ludacris to Radiohead. With companies like Ning making the creation of social networks a snap, it is easy to see that personal social networks are the future.

So, it might not surprise you to hear that Jessica Biel is getting into the act by starting her own social network.

The catch here is that it's not a social network about Jessica Biel. Instead, the former 7th Heaven actress and star of Hollywood hits such as The Illusionist and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry has the crazy idea that social networks can be used for good.

The Make The Difference Network is about connecting individuals and businesses to nonprofit organizations and increasing the visibility of thousands of nonprofits. It also streamlines the process of making charitable donations while making sure that 100% of the donation goes to the nonprofit.

For this, I have to say, "Go Jessica! Way to use your power for good rather than evil!"

What do you think about Jessica's decision? Speak your mind in our forums.

Photo: Kevin Winter / Getty Images

The winners of the 2008 Webby Awards have been announced. Among the big winners were Apple, who got awards for best design and best use of video, PostSecret, winning for best cultural blog and netart, and Flickr, which won best practices and community.

Unsurprisingly, Facebook won as the people's choice for social networking, but Flock, the social networking browser, won the webby in social networking.

Among other winners were Kongregate, who brought home the award for the best games website, the Annie Lennox Official Website which won as the best celebrity site. and The Onion, winner of the humor award.

On the mobile front, the Mobile NYTimes won as the best mobile news source and Zannel brought home the award as the best mobile social network.