Social butterflies have a new way to be in multiple places at one time. AT&T* today announced the availability of AT&T Social Net, a free mobile social networking application that combines access to Facebook®, MySpace, Twitter and customizable news feeds within a single application.

"Five of the top 10 searches on our mobile Web portal are for social networking sites, a clear indication of the growing popularity of mobile social networking," said Mark Collins, vice president of voice and data products, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets. "With this app, we're satisfying the increasing demand for aggregation apps that make it easy for customers to be active in multiple communities simultaneously."

Through a single carousel menu, users can view and manage their social communities, communicate and track events in real time, and get live news feeds from over 35 leading news, sports, and entertainment sites. Once a user populates the application with his or her information, users can see and respond to tweets, status updates, wall posts, profile comments, photo activity and friends' news feeds across their communities. Users can also access new or unread articles from their customized content feeds.

Users can even be notified that they have updates on their social networking accounts when the AT&T Social Net application is closed. When certain actions like comments from a friend, new wall posts or photo updates occur, users will receive a pop-up notification with an option to launch the application and check their updates. Users who wish to disable this notification feature can do so in the application's settings menu.

Customers can download AT&T Social Net at no cost in the AT&T MEdia Mall, accessible directly from handsets and online at www.att.com/mediamall. Standard data and messaging rates apply during use of the application, and an unlimited data plan is strongly recommended. For more information on AT&T's data and messaging plans, go to www.att.com.
An early version of AT&T Social Net, named "Notifier," was one of the first applications to be featured in the AT&T Apps Beta program, which gives developers the chance to test applications with AT&T customers and receive direct consumer feedback before making their apps broadly available. Customer feedback from AT&T Apps Beta program has been used by iSkoot, the company tapped by AT&T to develop the application, as a way to sharpen the app's performance.

"The feedback generated from Apps Beta helped us confirm some hypotheses and prioritize some features before general release," said Mark Jacobstein, CEO of iSkoot. "For example, we focused on ensuring seamless operation on touch-screen devices - a huge point of interest with Apps Beta users - and also added server-side content caching to improve app speed and responsiveness."
AT&T Social Net is supported by roughly 20 AT&T handsets, including some of the company's most popular quick messaging phones and feature phones. AT&T customers can check to see if their devices are compatible by accessing www.att.com/socialnetdevices.