Why Facebook’s Future Is Mobile
Feb 12, 2009 6:02:04 AM from http://gigaom.com/2009/02/10/why-facebooks-future-is-mobile/
Why Facebook’s Future Is Mobile
Om Malik| Tuesday, February 10, 2009 | 9:00 PM PTWith nearly 2,000 “friends” on Facebook, I should be a regular visitor to the site. I amnot. Instead, I prefer to use Facebook’s mobile application on my iPhone to sendmessages, update my status, upload photos taken on the go and sometime even scrollthrough the news feed to see what my friends are up to. The ad- and clutter-freeinterface has fewer distractions and makes using Facebook a breeze.Apparently, I am one of 25 million Facebook mobile users andone of 4 million whoaccess theserviceon a daily basis. That’s a sizable portion of Facebook’s 150 million
(and growing) registered users, and with them lies Facebook’s future. With the rise of superphones such as Apple’s iPhone, the BlackBerry Bold and Nokia’s E71 and N96devices, we are at the cusp of a new era in which the mobile and the wired webconverge. This convergence, when married to location-based services, would create anew real-time and highly contextual Internet experience.I recently pointed outthat “as we transition to an increasingly mobile world, the locationbeacon takes the role of the TCP, and most mobile services (and applications) find their context from this location beacon.” In this brave new world, the browser-centric methodof “search, find and consume” is quaint at best. These superphones, driven by locationbeacon and live Internet connections, need to be able to display relevant data with a lotof serendipity. Google is hoping to achieve that by marrying location-based services andlocal data using a map as an interface.Compare that to Facebook’s mobile efforts, which could pivot around your real socialgraph (a fancy way of saying your address book). By merging the social network withyour phone’s address book, Facebook integrates the mobile with the web seamlessly toprovide a mobile experience with a higher degree of social relevance. “Facebook hasall along said it wants to mirror real-world relationships,”Liz Gannes wrote last year .“When you throw mobile into the mix, there’s no reason to even have to separate so-called offline and online contacts.”With your social network at your proverbial finger tips, forget making phone calls to planan evening out or a Superbowl party. Facebook can also help extend its vast arrayof applications to the mobile world, making planning such activities relatively easy. Someof these applications will provide advertising and e-commerce opportunities. For instance, if you are going to see movies with a friend, a reminder of a nearby bar whereyou could meet for a pre-movie drink could pop up in the ad. It would be a paidplacement of course.
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