Virgin Mobile USA has announced new initiatives to empower its prepaid and postpaid customers with the latest mobile social networking technology.

These new initiatives, both available at no additional cost beyond normal Internet access charges, offer Virgin Mobile USA customers new and innovative ways to hook up.

"The strategy here is to provide the best overall experience to our customers in the primary ways they communicate," said Jayne Wallace, spokeswoman for Virgin Mobile USA, Warren, NJ.

"So many people who are involved with social networking sites are on more than one," she said. "So aggregating them and making multiple access easy, makes sense.

"It's similar to how Virgin Mobile USA first launched access to a variety of sites, not just MySpace and Facebook."

Connect is the first new initiative. It is a new social networking dashboard designed to give Helio By Virgin Mobile members quick and easy access to the latest updates from certain social media and networking sites.

The second noew feature, Mobile Lounge, is a Virgin Mobile customer-exclusive mobile community now available on the VirginXL storefront.

"The challenge is that there are more and more social networking sites coming up and more niche areas so someone might be on Facebook, LinkedIn, Mi Gente and Twitter," Ms. Wallace said. "The previous technology was just not as facile -- you had to log out of one site and then log onto the other.

"Online people tend to have multiple windows open -- this provides the same convenience. Imagine if you had to shut down your email before you could open the Internet," she said.

Connect lets Helio users display friend updates and activity from social media and networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube in an easy-to-use, dashboard-style mobile interface which connects users directly to those sites.

The new feature will launch first on Helio's Ocean, Mysto, Fin, Heat and Drift.

Connect will roll out to Virgin Mobile USA prepaid mobile phones during the first quarter of 2009.

Mobile Lounge robust user interface allows users to see which friends are online and features micro-blogging capabilities, discussion boards, chat rooms and profile creation and contests.

Mobile Lounge is accessible on Virgin Mobile USA mobile phones such as the Shuttle, Flare, Slash and others from the VirginXL storefront, which provides members with access to all of the latest services, games, ringtones and news for 15 cents per day.

"Mobile social networking is exploding and like the initial mobile field and the online world from the 90s, it will take a while to figure out how customers are using and want to use it, and how we can continue to improve the user experience on both our prepaid and postpaid phones.

"It's simply another step in the social community [r]evolution which we see percolating in so many areas," she said. "For example, we started Studio V as a way to engage in the user-generated content phenomenon -- letting customers design their own graphics, then upload them to share, then be rated and sold so they earn credit.

"The comments section of Studio V has taken on a life of its own, sort of a micro social networking site. More and more of that will happen."