Yahoo has launched a beta site called Mixd that offers mobile-phone subscribers the ability to send text messages and share videos and pictures among friends. The service follows a trend among Internet portals to offer mobile social-networking services.Yahoo plans to market Mixd on a handful of college campuses across the nation. The service is centered on making it easy for groups of friends to use text messaging as a way to organize a party, meet in a restaurant, attend a football game or arrange any other social activity. Yahoo expects users to form a lot of ad hoc groups around particular events, and use the service's "reply-to-all" feature as way to communicate collectively. Individuals can also have private conversations, and people have the option whether to join a group. The creator also has the option of kicking people out.MySpace, owned by News Corp. and among the Web's most popular social networks, is developing mobile services for its users. In addition, the site has a partnership with youth-oriented wireless carrier Helio, which offers social-networking services based on global positioning systems in high-end mobile phones.

InterCasting Corp.'s Rabble is another example of a GPS-based service, and Microsoft is testing mobile software, called SLAM, that would provide personal locator services, as well as messaging and photo sharing.