One of the things I find surprising is how many marketing people diss iphones and apps as a niche market.

My favourite was hearing that the buzz around apps is driven by the fact creative directors have iphones yet don't realise that nobody else does. Of course now you can buy an iphone on Orange, Vodafone and at Tesco (and it is rumoured that TMobile and Virgin will get you one if you shout loud enough) as well as O2, that myth is evaporating.

But I was delighted to see some new data which shows that more people have iphones than use Twitter;

Admob have an interesting post showing Apple had shipped 78million devices by the end of 09

And BBH Labs pointed out research showing that Twitter had 75 million user accounts at the end of 09. And the research points out that in December only 17% of those accounts actually tweeted - supporting their view that;

A large percentage of Twitter accounts are inactive, with about 25% of accounts having no followers and about 40% of accounts having never sent a single Tweet.

Add to that one of my favourite stats - since the start of 2007 Canalsys data shows that over 350 million smartphones have shipped. So the number of people with Smartphones is around the same as the number of Facebook users.

Now I'm a big fan of Twitter and Facebook - and social in general - but this data supports my view that brands would be much better off investing in a smart mobile strategy than jumping into social.

And the future of social is all about mobile any way.