When we launched Mahalo Social last week at Le Web 3 we asked folks to enter their Twitter accounts into their profiles. Today we turned them on, and it’s very simple and cool. When you’re looking at a Mahalo Social profile you can click over to a Twitter tab and see what the person is Tweeting.

Sure, we could have built our own little messaging system, but frankly as a user I don’t want to remember another SMS code or download another client or two. It’s some much easier to just let the power users syndicate their accounts over.

It was funny to me when we launched Mahalo six months ago (has it been that long!?) a large number of folks attacked us for being sooooo simple. Well, that’s the point isn’t it? Build something really simple for a large group of folks…. I mean, Google’s 10 links with abstracts didn’t change much over the past eight years did they? They just added video to the results gosh darn it.

However, the social networking part of Mahalo, well, that is designed for advanced users and will have some advanced user features like syndicating your Twitter feed. Advanced features for an advanced function: using a social network to refine and build search results. The social network at Mahalo isn’t for socializing like Facebook…. it socializing as a tool to build better results.

Social networks with a purpose are the future… that’s why I think NING is going to be bigger than Facebook–like twice as big. People can create a social network on NING to solve a problem, and they can own the entire social graph–not just borrow it from Facebook.

My two most important companies of 2007 and into 2008? Ning and Twitter.