Virgin Mobile USA is giving its customers the ability to build their own mobile communities, thanks to a newly signed agreement with Upoc Networks which calls for the company to deliver the application functionality.

Under the terms of the agreement, Upoc will power a mobile community for Virgin Mobile customers. Upoc's mobile community is made up of more than 20,000 messaging groups, which mainly consist of user-generated affinity groups, Upoc says. Virgin Mobile customers also will be allowed to create personal messaging groups of their own.

Down the road, Upoc plans to extend the capabilities of the Virgin Mobile service to include community MMS, interactive voice response (IVR) services and premium SMS messaging programs.

The Virgin Mobile community service will be available to customers who own Virgin Mobile phones that support a WAP browser or SMS.

Upoc has been busy over the last few months. In April, Upoc inked a deal to deliver mobile SMS applications to the hospitality market. The agreement with W Hotels Worldwide was forged to enable hotel guests to receive communications via text message from the hotel staff, even if they are not on the hotel grounds. The service works with SMS-enabled phones.

In March, the company announced it was powering Cingular Wireless' Idol TXT Chats, which gives customers a chance to chat with recently eliminated finalists from Fox's "American Idol" television show.