With no third party data available on mobile website usage in India, we’re relying on company information for trends. Over the past couple of weeks, conversations I’ve had with even those who were critical of the GPRS usage in India have been optimistic. As much as the operators were earlier blamed for maintaining walled gardens earlier, I do believe they deserve credit for opening up GPRS access. Tie-ups for search with Google (NSDQ: GOOG), MSN and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) would also have helped.

So onwards to the stats from Opera Software, for Opera Mini usage trends for the first quarter of 2008. As per the report, as much as 48.9 percent traffic from Opera Mini users went to mobile social networking sites - indeed, Orkut tops the list, and five of the top ten are social networking sites, and content appears to be important as well:

1. Orkut (social networking)
2. Google (search)
3. Yahoo Mobile (search and content)
4. Peperonity (social networking and content)
5. Mobile9 (content)
6. Mocospace (social networking)
7. 160by2 (advertising) (Online SMS Provider)
8. Mobango (social networking and content)
9. Itsmy (social networking and content)
10. Indianrail.gov.in (ticketing)

I’ve never even heard of some of these sites, though someone had mentioned peperonity to me recently. Looks like it’s a completely different universe on the mobile. Bear in mind that these results are for Opera Mini users, and not necessarily for all mobile Internet users from India. No absolute numbers have been mentioned, and percentages on a small base can be misleading The report does highlight the fact that social networking and content are key, though keep in mind that in the US, South Africa and Indonesia, the social Web accounts for more than 60 percent of the traffic. Another interesting trend - “Full Web surfing comprises more than 77% of all traffic, while WAP and .mobi sites accounted for 23 percent.” But that’s probably because most of the sites aren’t WAP enabled, and much of this traffic must be search driven. This distinction between WAP and Full Web is not relevant for users - they care about the content of the site, and how user-friendly it is. More on trends in the top ten countries here.