Frengo’s OpenSocial Mobile Toolkit

Earlier this week, Frengo, a mobile media company that provides games and social networking applications for your phone, announced the availability of its OpenSocial Mobile Toolkit. This toolkit will provide developers with a way to take their web apps from OpenSocial-compliant social networks and make them mobile.

The Frengo OpenSocial Mobile Toolkit includes SMS alerts and notifications and mobile web services like WAP site hosting, handset recognition and transcoding. And for developers looking to earn money from their mobile apps, Frengo will also offer traffic monetization, advertising brokering and premium billing services.

Frengo partner, RockYou, kicked off the launch with their mobile app, "Horoscopes," a web app that is available on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, hi5, and now is mobile, too.

Additionally, the infamous LOLcat site, I Can Has Cheezburger, is  also offering a mobile app built on the Frengo platform. You can text "LOL" to 44566 to start getting funny cat pictures delivered to your phone thanks to Frengo’s rich photo and image handling capabilities. (Or just sign up here.)

The Frengo platform will support all the major U.S. carriers and the majority of the global carriers, reaching more than a billion phones worldwide.

What I’m curious about is where does this leave Facebook? OpenSocial was originally designed to combat Facebook’s popularity and offer an alternative to their closed platform. Now with an OpenSocial-compliant mobile toolkit available, will Facebook feel compelled to join the group or will they just build their own toolkit for developers?

The Facebook mobile site (m.facebook.com) and Facebook Mobile applications, like that available for the Blackberry, both do a nice job of connecting you with friends, events, messages, news, and photos. However, Facebook’s slew of applications are not available when mobile.

Although some would argue that not having the ability to throw sheeps at each other is a good thing, the fact is many users enjoy the social network’s apps and would love to see them go mobile.

Imagine if you could access your favorite Facebook apps from your phone? Who wouldn’t want a little Scrabulous while waiting in line at the DMV?