GigaOM » Facebook Mobile

You missed it: The Facebook phone is already here

Colleen Taylor — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:31:50 +0000

It’s become clear that smartphones are going to be increasingly ubiquitous for the foreseeable future. And a recent study indicates that many people are using those devices to access Facebook more than for anything else.

Facebook is now one of the top three providers of email messaging on mobile phones, according to a recent survey conducted by market research firm CCS Insights. In fact, the survey shows such growth for Facebook across all applications — from video viewing to social networking to mobile messaging — that CCS Insight predicts that Facebook could soon transcend offerings from industry giants such as Apple, Google and Microsoft.

“Facebook is fast becoming the default destination for all things mobile,” CCS Insight director Paolo Pescatore said in a press release accompanying the research report. “The mobile phone is now one of the most prolific consumer electronics devices on the planet.”

It turns out that even though the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social networking company does not yet have its own mobile operating system or hardware products, Facebook is already a major player in all things mobile in its native U.S. and abroad. CCS conducted its survey of mobile Internet usage in May 2011 with 7,000 respondents in France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, U.K., and the U.S. Based on the information CCS culled from Europe, Facebook is swiftly supplanting regional social networking sites among users many regions there, such as Tuenti in Spain.

And Facebook has no plans to slow down its growth on the mobile front. The company is said to be working on its own mobile browser platform, powered by the quickly growing markup language HTML5, so that the mobile experience of its social networking site can be uniform across all devices in the future. Will anyone be using their mobile phones for actual phone calls anymore? In the years ahead, the answer may be no.

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Four Ways Facebook Can Conquer Mobile

Colin Gibbs — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 16:00:52 +0000

There are plenty of good reasons for Facebook to offer a branded phone, as Liz pointed out here last week, but producing a Facebook phone isn’t necessary for the company to better leverage mobile. In my weekly column over at GigaOM Pro, I take an in-depth look at four things the social network should do to capitalize on the exploding world of mobile data:

Open its own app store. As I wrote more than a year ago, Facebook already has a massive developer community, a payment system and tremendous traffic — three components that are key for any distributor of mobile apps. While it obviously couldn’t deliver applications to iPhone users, Facebook could certainly tap into the booming Android space, not to mention the huge Symbian market.

Leverage its vast library of contact information. While Android automatically syncs contact information for Facebook users, the company’s iPhone app does little more than add profile pictures to the address book. Facebook has a chance here to expand that integration and add features like presence and location.

Compete with Google Voice. Improving the sync of contact information paves the way for a user’s Facebook ID to become more important than the phone number itself, as Om noted last week. Opening up a mobile address book — which is essentially a user’s network of Facebook friends — would allow one to call, IM, text message or email anyone in their network with just a couple of clicks and would be a competitor for Google’s voice service.

Allow users to share information with specific groups. Facebook has a few hard-to-find settings that users can tweak to give friends varying levels of access to their information, but the company should enable users to create customized groups of friends (like colleagues, family members and college buddies) that would see different kinds of information. Once those settings are established online, they should be easy to find and use on the phone, making it simple to send the right content to the right people without exposing others to it.

Read the full post here.

Image courtesy Flickr user C.G.P. Grey.

Rogue Devices: The Consumer Influence on Enterprise Mobility, Part 1

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 07:00:49 +0000

Today’s end-users are very vocal about the freedom they experience with their iPhones as consumers versus the frustration they feel in the workplace with limited device choices and a lack of apps. This research brief (the first in a two-part series) addresses the issue of how consumers can connect personal mobile devices to the enterprise, and also looks at how IT can play a pivotal role in harvesting such a capability.

Carriers to Facebook Mobile: Get on a Data Diet

Jennifer Martinez — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:10:38 +0000

Facebook Mobile users are twice as active on the social network than web-only users and account for about a quarter of its entire user base. As a result, carriers have been asking Facebook to trim down the amount of data contained in its mobile web versions. Carriers “want the same service,” said Henri Moissinac, director of the company’s mobile unit, “but with less data.”

Their reasons are twofold: money and speed. The spike in data traffic that’s resulted from the proliferation of smartphones has affected both carriers’ gross margins on data plans and the customer experience. Carriers, of course, are tasked with the challenge of figuring out “how to encourage usage and keep margins for mobile broadband high without overloading their networks or driving users back to the bad old days when everyone was too afraid to open the web browser on their phone for fear of exorbitant data fees” as Stacey notes in a GigaOM Pro report released today (subscription required). It’s imperative that data plan customers are happy with how quickly they can, say, thumb through pictures and news feeds, and upload a comment to a friends’ status update. If not, they could take their business — and money — elsewhere.

To that end, Moissinac said that, for example, all photos on Facebook Mobile are low-resolution. And when dealing with carriers based in emerging countries with 2G networks, Facebook can make photos smaller or bury them within the app altogether so they’re not displayed when a user first logs on. But going forward, it will likely have to offer additional concessions, since for Facebook, which just released its first official mobile application for Android devices yesterday and is currently developing an app for Palm’s WebOS, accommodating carriers’ concerns will continue to be necessary in order for it to successfully expand across the mobile realm.

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Where Is Facebook 3.0 for the iPhone?

Om Malik — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:31:18 +0000

Facebook 3.0 for iPhone Screenshot courtesy of Facebook

Updated: On August 17, Facebook let us know that it had submitted the 3.0 version of its app to the Apple store.

Where is the newest version of Facebook’s iPhone 3.0 application? Being a fan of the app -– which I now use on my iPod Touch -– I was thrilled to hear that a new version with some snazzy new features was going to launch. After all, great as the current version might be, it still lacks certain features and could use a “user experience” facelift. But now six weeks have gone by, and still nothing.

One of the main developers of the application, Joe Hewitt, said on July 1 that he was nearly finished building the application. “I can’t predict an exact date when I will submit to Apple, but I can say that I am about 98% done,” he wrote in the blog post.

Facebook for iPhone is one of the best applications for that platform. According to the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social networking company, there are some 30 million people who use Facebook Mobile. And it plans to reveal in September new mobile user data that’s said to put that figure much higher. Which ties in with an argument we made earlier this year: Facebook’s future is mobile. As we explained, the reasons are simple: “Facebook has all along said it wants to mirror real-world relationships,” wrote Liz Gannes. “When you throw mobile into the mix, there’s no reason to even have to separate so-called offline and online contacts.”

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