Statement of the Problem

The indicators that the time for such a workshop is rapidly approaching include:

Social networking on mobile networks is reaching critical mass. In May 2008 a study by Opera Software reported that social networking accounts for almost 40 percent of worldwide mobile web traffic, topping the 60 percent mark in some countries including the U.S., South Africa and Indonesia.
Several initiatives have been launched seeking to reduce barriers between community platforms and to protect users' data on the Web. Ranging from the Open Web Foundation to DataPortability.org to the Open Social Foundation, these initiatives demonstrate that there is widespread interest in interoperable social networking. These initiatives run the risk of competing with one another in scope or having to be repeated for mobile. A holistic "landscape" view of all social networking standards (and, in some cases, proprietary) activities is necessary.
There is also a rising interest in semantic integration across multiple heterogeneous sources and this work needs to be applied in particular to social data in order to ensure that such data are suitable for mobile as well as Web usage/access. There are vastly different data formats for social data, such as vCard, the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) microformat, and the FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend) Semantic Web vocabulary.
In the fall of 2008 and the year 2009, tens of millions of new "Web-friendly" handsets are entering the market. The adoption of Mobile Web standards and the gradual expansion of flat-rate data service packages will lower barriers to entry and increase the above mentioned adoption of mobile social networking.
The recent uptake in identity services that allow a single-sign on, such as OpenID, and an increased interest and proliferation of work in identity federation, such as SAML, Cardspace, the Higgins Trust Framework, and WS-Federation and WS-Trust. All of these identity services will help users prevent the insecure repeat passwords and user-names across multiple services, and work of this type should, where possible, be integrated into the mobile and PC social networking landscape.
Finally, there is the rise of location sensitive services which are already being integrated into handsets and context aware mobile services. Location-aware and location-based services are increasing the compelling use cases for mobile social networking. There are new initiatives within the W3C and across other standards bodies already focusing on location-based services and for mobile communities' interests to be well represented, the industry leaders need to evalute how these solutions match social networking requirements.