Microsoft announced today that Windows Live, and especially the Messenger & Hotmail services will be part of Nokia’s next handset. Nokia is the leading handset manufacture of the world, with strong aspiration to be an internet player as well.

With this deal, I think Nokia’s strategy is becoming quite clear: to offer the next generation mobile portal.

They have the tools (Messenger, mail…), they have Flickr, they have their own music service (Loudeye) and they have a user generated content video service - Twango.

If I could place a bet, the next cooperation would be with a global media company like Newscorp, that can offer Nokia with branded video content all over the world.

This move is going to put a threat the on mobile operators’ premium content revenues estimated at around $20B world wide. They will become pipe-only like the Internet service providers (isp).

k.

One more sign that Facebook is growing in a way that might put the domination of MySpace on hold is a new study by Comscore . According to the study, Facebook achieved 270% growth in the last year and MySpace only 72%. 114M people were visiting MyApace on the last month, and 52M were visiting Facebook. Myspace is still more than double in traffic, but last year it had 4 times the traffic.

If I can predict, next year we will see them neck to neck. Bebo, by the way, is far away with only 18M visitors, but it still is the strongest site on Europe.

k.

It’s been a while since I last wrote. It’s so hot here in Israel that I can’t even connect the words into one sentence…

I wanted to announce that 8hands, our amazing social network aggregator, is gaining more and more users and popularity. We are now supporting MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and any RSS feed. Coming soon – Gmail.

We are improving 8hands on a weekly basis and this is a great opportunity to tell all of you – please download it and give us your feedback.

Looking forward to hear your comments.

k.