Between January 2008 and January 2009, the number of people accessing the internet daily from a mobile device increased from 10.8 million to 22.4 million people according to a comScore report. The report studied the habits of 63.2 million people that accessed the internet to some degree with their phone for news and information.

"Over the course of the past year, we have seen use of mobile Internet evolve from an occasional activity to being a daily part of people's lives," observed Mark Donovan, senior vice president, mobile, comScore. "This underscores the growing importance of the mobile medium as consumers become more reliant on their mobile devices to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information."

What is interesting about this is that the above numbers exclude social networking sites. Those stats were looked at separately. As general information access rose 107% year over year, access to social networking sites on a mobile device jumped 427%, from 1.8 million daily users to 9.3 million daily users. While specific sites weren't mentioned, I suspect Twitter and Facebook were both big drivers in these numbers. Twitter alone has grown nearly 1,700% in the last twelve months and Facebook continues to grow at a rapid pace. Both sites, as well as other social networking sites, have mobile friendly sites, allowing people to update their information in a variety of ways, from SMS, mobile web pages or applications you can install on your phone. They also have the ability, if you enable them, to send you text or email messages when someone else you are interested in has updated, which encourages you to respond with your own update.

Regardless of what people are accessing with their phones, when over 22 million people are doing it daily, it is a market that cannot be ignored. Unfortunately, many mainstream sites seem to do just that by not having a mobile friendly website to view. Even with the iPhone, which does a good job rendering pages designed for a desktop, it still involves scrolling and zooming to get to the data you want. Many other devices simply cannot load or effectively browse some sites. What can be even worse is when you click on a link to go to a website and the site recognizes you are on a phone and it immediately redirects you to a lame home page with a dozen or so stories, and not one of them is the one you had clicked through. The study shows 70% of users are using a feature phone to access data, not a smartphone, so the more mobile friendly the site is, the more likely it is to render on a wider variety of phones and platforms.

Site owners take note: mobile device access is growing like crazy. People will only give you one or two chances to be accessable on their phone or they will access your competitor's mobile friendly site. That goes for services too. I am not sure I'd change banks over whether or not mine was available on my phone, but I know for a fact if I was changing banks now, I wouldn't consider one that didn't have mobile access. I also stick with news, weather, tech news and social networking sites that are light-weight and have pages designed for phone use. There are at least 22 million people daily voting in a similar fashion with their thumbs or finger tips.