Mobile Internet has been a neverending promise. Gurus started speculating about it becoming mainstream in 2000, when UMTS licences were auctioned in many European countries. Unfortunately, phones were not ready for intensive multimedia usage and users were not willing to pay high rates for Internet data in small screens.

Companies which invested money to make their sites mobile-ready never got it back. R&D was it called. Telecoms operators lost huge amounts of money with the licences they bought. So did companies that bought contents for mobiles, though some of them could make some business through premium SMS messages.

But things are changing. Apple and RIM have made the miracle with their iPhone and blackberry. Batteries last enough time and screens are big (and nice) enough. Plain rates for data have also contributed to the miracle. And people are starting to use their mobile device to browse the Internet and download their e-mail.

As a result, ComScore reported yesterday that the number of people using their mobile device to access news and information on the Internet more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2009. Among the audience of 63.2 million people who accessed news and information on their mobile devices in January 2009, 22.4 million (35 percent) did so daily; more than double the size of the audience last year.

Social networks are doing the rest, as they become addictive services, specially for youngsters. According to ComScore, there were 1.7 million people in the US in December 2007 using a social network or blog from their mobile phone. They were 9.3 million one year later. This is an astonishing 427% increase.

All the big players are taking positions in this new market, including Google, after the launch of a location service. Nokia has also invested a lot of money in order to become a service provider and not just a phone manufacturer. And Yahoo is pushing to become on mobiles what it used to be on the Web.

Facebook has by itself 25 million mobile users. The commercialization of phones and cameras that integrate direct photo and video download buttons is going to increase this use. I think that every single user of Facebook will combine its computer and mobile phone by the end of 2010.

This has a very clear advantage: we won’t need to update two address book. It will be enough with Facebook’s. MySpace is not so optimistic and expects half of its users to log on from mobile devices by 2010.