Social media giant, Facebook, recently announced that it had reached a 800 million member-base. Now, it has come out with another statistic – Approximately 350 million users access Facebook on their mobiles. And for these huge numbers, Erick Tseng, head of mobile products at Facebook, said, “The Timeline will be ready for mobile platforms almost immediately.” He was speaking at GigaOM’s Mobilize 2011 forum in San Francisco on Tuesday. Tseng predicted that within the next year or two, almost half of Facebook’s users would be using the mobile platform.
“We are going to be a mobile company,” said Tseng pointing out that the growth of mobile usage is faster, especially in regions such as India, Africa and South East Asia. As Facebook is entering or gaining popularity in countries where people do not have access to computers as much as they do to cellphones, Tseng said that in order to serve such customers, the company was deploying the technology it had acquired with the purchase of Israel-based Snaptu.
Snaptu can serve up mobile web pages on cell phones in under a minute and the project titled, “Facebook for every phone,” is now being used on atleast 2500 phones worldwide.
As far as smartphones are concerned, Tseng affirmed that the company has a lot of devices where Facebook is not only pre-loaded but baked into the OS, and hence, developers can plug into that social graph without much effort. He also said that he hoped to see a Facebook integration with iOS5 soon.
When asked to comment on Google+, Tseng said that the budding social network was ‘great’ and said that competition is good because the greatest beneficiaries will be the users. “We constantly push each other to come up with new features,” he said.
Dismissing rumors about an official Facebook app for the iPad and the Facebook-branded phone, Tseng said, “When I say a platform, I truly mean a platform – a service for software.” He added that every phone should be social.
In another vein, Alexia Tsotsis of Techcrunch browsed the Facebook mobile developers page and is of the view that it is pretty interesting because it describes Facebook mobile web app features and includes screenshots that are “unlike anything we have seen live.”
Tsotsis concludes from the screenshots on the page that the app’s core components, icons for Bookmarks, Messages, Notifications and Friend Requests match the screenshots of Project Spartan, the HTML5-based mobile app platform that Facebook has been working on with 3rd party developers for some time now.
The text of the page describes a Facebook Mobile App integration of an iOS and Android, except that it does not seem to be a Facebook app that anyone actually has access to, says Tsotsis.
It could be that Facebook is contemplating a revamp of its existing mobile app. However, Facebook refused to comment on the matter and in case they pulled the page down Tsotsis included the entire page in a pdf format which can be read here – www.scribd.com