Sasken, which provides mobile software services and solutions, has put forward a proposal in the Symbian Foundation for a Social Mobile Framework, which will hopefully be included in future releases of Symbian. The aim is "to enable seamless integration of social networks and web services into native C++ applications". Some more details and links below, if you're a developer or if you're interested.

"Sasken's package will contain a selection of libraries to make the interaction with web services simpler from native Symbian applications. Additionally, the package can house concrete service stub libraries for popular web services. Sasken will not build the applications but provide the framework, and API, for developers to create such apps more easily."

For developers:

• They can create their own plug-ins to support the web service they want
• It's a common way to integrate web services to applications
• Service providers can distribute plug-ins for their own services

You can find an outline of the proposal here (PDF link) and plenty more information here.

As usual for the Symbian Foundation, Sasken will develop this framework openly. That is, they'll work from a Symbian-hosted Mercurial repository that anyone can see, any time they want, always with the latest code. This will keep the developer community closely involved: they can review interface specifications, identify problems early, prototype application code, contribute code of their own and never be surprised by bulk changes.

See also Symbian's blog for more on this today.