Social networking seems to be going mobile, with Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster adding functions or applications that allow users to access their online profiles through your mobile phones.

But, according to a recent posting I came across in Wap Review, it’s been around since the days of the new millennium in a more archaic form, however. There is the German-based Peperoncity (www.peperoncity.com), for example, as well as TagTag (www.tagtag.com) and ItsMy (wap.itsmy.com).

When they were launched almost 7 years ago, such mobile-friendly sites allowed users to create a simple WAP-based homepage using a menu-driven site builder. But over the years, they incorporated features now quite common in today’s world: chatrooms, messaging, friend lists, content sharing, and guestbooks. Now, they’re as equipped and fully loaded as the next social networking site.

Established in 2000, Peperoncity was created to allow users to meet great mobile people from all over the world and create your own WAP site. It’s available in a variety of languages French, Italian, Polish, German, Portuguese, and English and its current number of active users has breached the 460,000 mark, with 3.5 million mobile webpages and counting.

Peperoncity users may also sell downloadable content and collect payments using Bango (www.Bango.com). In addition to the peperoncity.com site, they also provide a white label mobile social platform to mobile operators including O2, T-Mobile, KPN and TIM.

According to the Wap Review post, Peperoncity is one of the few purely mobile plays in social networking today. New users can register on the mobile site, although both a phone number and an email address are required. Your site can be created and maintained using only a mobile phone. There is a PC web interface, but all of its functionality is also available in the mobile version.

Given all the buzz over mobile marketing and the growing popularity of social networking in these interactive times, pioneers like Peperoncity are well ahead of their times as they’ve always been, apparently. Soon, with the increased development and mass availability of internet-friendly mobile phones like the iPhone and its tech-savvy spawns, mobile social networking may take off in more ways than one.