The Trendspotting blog offers a really great overview and analysis of a Telephia and comScore research project released released on May 14 that details their latest study of mobile vs. PC-based Internet usage in the UK and the US.

Research highlights:

UK and US mobile market are similarly developed: mobile market size in number of users is 19% out of the web pc market size.
Men under the age of 35 are the early adopters who are more likely to use mobile devices to access the Mobile Web
* Leading in the mobile web (January 07):
Popular pc internet sites Yahoo!, MSN and Google (both in the US and UK)
Popular in UK: BBC and SKY
Popular in the US: The Weather Channel and AOL

The trendspotting blog goes on to pose the question: Will social networks apps drive the mobile web?

Having the early adopters study in mind, and acknowledging the social networking sites success (55% of all of online American youths ages 12-17 use an online social networking sites, according to Pew Internet & American Life Project), where would you say a short messages social network as twitter mobile be in the next few months?

My questions about the study really center on unique users. I didn't see any data around overlap of mobile and pc users, meaning the study assumes you are either a mobile web user or a pc-based web user. Again, I may have overlooked the data. If this is a working assumption, I would think it was incorrect, as I bet there is as much as 50% (at least). Further, I wonder if the early adopter audience really makes a distinction between mobile and pc-based web experiences, form factor of the device aside?

One thing is for certain: Those of us who build online communities need to start paying attention to the mobile web now.