Blue Whale Systems Ltd is pushing Facebook news feed, status updates and wall items to its BlueWhaleMail social networking application for mobile.

BlueWhaleMail notifies consumers of their friends' Facebook status updates, wall posts and news items, and lets them send messages, poke friends or write on their wall in response. Notifications are displayed as soon as they are received without requiring users to manually browse the Facebook Web site.

"We started the company with an exclusive focus on the mobile email experience," said Richard Seward, founder/CEO of Blue Whale Systems, London. "Then we realized that email was only part of the story, and that more and more people were using social networking, so we said 'Let's provide the same push services for Facebook that we've done for email.'"

The BlueWhaleMail service also supports email. It is initially available for Nokia Series 60 and SonyEricsson phones.

The service mainly targets demographics ranging from teens to consumers in their mid-thirties.

"In particular we're looking at age-based migration of people, young school-aged groups and people 18 and onwards, the 18-36 range who have plenty of contacts on Facebook," Mr. Seward said.

"Many of these people have started work, and employers tend to ban access to Facebook, and if that's the case or if they're not in front of their PC they want to stay in contact with their friends," he said.

Instead of browsing for their Facebook messages, all alerts will get pushed onto consumers' mobile phones.

"The key idea here is that if you make people browse on their handsets, some will, and some won't," Mr. Seward. "SMS wouldn't have taken off the way it has, BlackBerry wouldn't have taken off the way that it did, so why make people browse for their Facebook profile?"

Blue Whale Systems claims that one of the application's outstanding features is that it is very easy to set up. The company has also launched a Facebook Web application to help with setup.

With a team of engineers previously from companies such as Microsoft, Nokia, Research In Motion, Symbian, Vodafone and T-Mobile, Blue Whale Systems aims to make mobile phone software simple.

BlueWhaleMail can be interactively test-driven and pre-configured for download via the iTunes Apps Store at http://apps.facebook.com/bluewhalemail. Consumers need their Facebook username and password.

Alternatively, consumers can browse to the site at http://bluewhale.net on their Web-enabled mobile device.

BlueWhaleMail is positioning itself with the awareness of the popularity of SMS and the fact that not everyone has a iPhone, BlackBerry or other smartphone.

"Looking at the existing patterns of usage, we're seeing the penetration of SMS, but far lower levels for mobile email - 64 percent of Internet users use social networks but there are still very low levels of mobile Internet penetration," Mr. Seward said.

"People using the iPhone have social networking, but what about the everyman and everywoman, what about people who don't have a specialty device, how will they get access to their social networks?" he said.

Mr. Seward believes that the mobile industry has a long way to go as far as enabling popular services such as social networking.

"It's a failure of the mobile industry as a whole, it shouldn't require a third party like us to enable mobile social networking," Mr. Seward said.

"You would think that carriers and manufacturers would've addressed this by now, but name a carrier that has a great social networking platform for mobile," he said.

Up to now, the industry has not made it easy for subscribers to download applications onto their handsets.

"We spent a lot of time working on getting devices set up to use these services, because the mobile industry hasn't made it easy enough to access applications like this," Mr. Seward said.

"We're building our own application within Facebook so you can try it before you've even touched your mobile phone," he said.

Consumers can put in their mobile phone number and Blue Whale Systems will send them a link to their phone.

If consumers click on the link in the text message, they can download a preconfigured version of the application which their phone stores and connects with their Facebook profile. Consumers must then enter their password to access their account.

Blue Whale Systems plans to expand on various fronts.

"We'll start to grow out across different manufacturers such as Motorola on the Linux platform and devices on different operating systems such as Windows Mobile," Mr. Seward said.

"We feel the time is right for us to look into North America, so we want to look at handsets that are more popular in the U.S," he said.

Blue Whale Systems also plans to run a mobile advertising campaign to get the word out about the application. It aims to take advantage of the viral effects of social networking.

"We will place adds within the Facebook application itself, so we'll become visible through users' profiles to their friends and contacts," Mr. Seward said.

"The obvious missing element is MySpace," he said. "We've got to get that done, and we want to sink our teeth into the largest social networks worldwide, which obviously varies by region."

The service is free and funded by banner ads in the display of incoming items. Subway and French automaker Citroën have both signed on to advertise on the platform.

"The leading players advertising in this space have been car manufacturers," Mr. Sewell said. "We never ask users to pay us. We make our money through the advertising. Since consumers don't generally pay for mobile content, we had to come up with a way to deliver this service for free.

"It's important to implement the advertising in a way that's not annoying to the end-user and is respectful," he said. "Smaato sits between us and companies like AdMob and Ad Infuse and sells advertising on our behalf."

To date, mobile advertising has largely been geared towards putting adds on WAP sites. But Blue Whale Systems wants to let people to check their pages and serve ads to them when they are out of network.

"We want to increase mobile advertising's level of complexity, we'd like to start getting more relevant in terms of the ads we're showing people," Mr. Seward said.

"The entire mobile advertising system has a bit of work to do before we can target ads at the fine-grain level and fully take advantage of user profile information to target ads," he said.