The deal will make Gypsii the "premier" mobile social networking platform for China Unicom, starting in Shanghai before rolling out elsewhere in China, where the operator has more than 130 million subscribers.

However, it will start on Shanghai Unicom's UniSpace portal, which has five million users. They'll be invited to download it to their handsets and start creating geotagged content.

The app is available for Java, Symbian and Windows Mobile handsets in China, with more to follow in the near future.

"With its fast-growing community and unique, intuitive user experience, Gypsii was the natural choice as a mobiel social networking partner," says Lu Dongliang, deputy general manager of Shanghai Unicom.

The two companies aren't strangers, though: they previously worked together during the 2008 Olympic Games.

China is an intriguing market for mobile social networking. It's certainly got scale, but also challenges when it comes to the freedom consumers have to post user-generated content.