In London and the UK, first it was Facebook and then LinkedIn. You were told, just like in Sydney, that you simply must join these networks. Interest became exponential and now, just like in Sydney, comes Twitter.

Although many suggest Twitter is the new Facebook, many also think asking sites to find friends by rifling through email address books and posting tweets of 160 characters already breeds banality, as well as social phenomena!

None deny the audience building, with Twitter’s reportedly doubling to 1.05 million between October 2007 and May 2008. I don’t think anyone sees it as the next big thing, but possibly the biggest gimmick. Gimmick is also a word that is now more widely associated with the thousands of apps within Facebook and MySpace.

However, Twitter is now most famous for its immediate and often inaccurate Mumbai Terrorist reports, instantly beating the newsworthiness of any media mainstream title.

Most agree their favourite Twitter gimmick is being able to follow anyone who has not limited the access to their feed. They also love getting messages from celebrity users as well as friends.

Barack Obama was right-on-time with ‘political cool’ and you have various unashamed geek British actors and writers/journalists re-inventing their careers by tweeting. Britney Spears is a given and sometimes doing a better job currently with her tech savvy than a lot of the aforementioned!

The offside is that even some members of the British and European Digerati complain that Twitter and other apps cannot read their work email addresses, effectively telling them they have no mates. A lot of people obviously just click on Everyone and I guess it’s here that you get Facebook comparisons.

Finding celebrities or even breaking news can sometimes mean logging on for a long time.

One thing is certain, even with page errors and lots of fascinating prattle from complete strangers, Twitter is still very much ‘of the now’ across a lot of space and phones. Personally, I think almost all of this is still very much part of a now very traditional search habit. With Yahoo now the exclusive search service for Virgin’s four million mobile subscribers, there are fresh and new attempts seemingly made daily to steal a lead on Google in mobile advertising search.

If anyone is ever not going to lose the same battle they lost for dominance in Google desktop search, they are spearheading their European efforts by trying to make themselves the favourite starting point for any access. That is any popular service and relevant information without needing to own the services and information. Be Google in other words, (difficult call!). Across France, Spain, Italy and Germany, Yahoo and Microsoft are hellbent in this attempt. But as the social app, browser and mobile internet wars persist, LG and Samsung have dramatically cut handset sales targets in response to global downturn. Vodafone has just launched a second £1billion cost-cutting drive in four months and Gartner have reported that world mobile phone sales will fall by up to 4% next year.

From my perspective in London during this last month of 2008, (certainly for my day in Seoul-Korea at their beautiful prestige transit lounge) it all seems to still be progressing at breakneck speed. I have big instincts that Social Media is now everlasting, but never by title or even social description or activities-habits. Handset advertising is all about the speed and variety of apps. The i-Phone catchcry of ‘This changes Everything’ is still relevant with apps appearing every day. But you’re only as good as your last app and hey, there are thousands of them!