Making it easy for anyone with a mobile phone to access its site, Facebook sees serious results
Facebook revealed today that its mobile site has seen extraordinary growth, counting
65 million people actively accessing the social network from mobile devices. That means 20 million more people are using Facebook Mobile since eight months ago.
In an
increasingly mobile world, it appears that the success of Facebook Mobile largely depends on the pervasiveness of the site across multiple venues.
Henri Moissinac, one of the mobile team’s key developers, detailed just how many ways users can access Facebook through mobile phones. For users with browser-enabled phones,
m.facebook.com is the main site for mobile Facebook use. The mobile team even designed another site,
x.facebook.com, specifically tailored for users with touchscreen phones, like the Palm Pre, Apple iPhone, and others from Android and Nokia.
Of course, Facebook has also designed full-featured applications for many mobile devices, including the iPhone, which received such a
bountiful update to its Facebook app late last week that users can now pretty much do anything on their phone that they’d be able to do online. Facebook is pretty dedicated about aiding mobile usage of its site; there are currently Facebook applications for INQ, HTC, LG Electronics, Motorola, Palm, RIM, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, the T-Mobile Sidekick, and Microsoft Windows Mobile-powered phones.
Beyond smartphones, even users with phones that lack all those fancy features can receive notifications, set statuses, and send and receive messages through SMS.
Along with Facebook Mobile’s latest milestone achievement, Facebook also announced today that users would start seeing wider assimilation of Facebook Connect across the mobile Web. Many users are already used to using Facebook Connect through their computers for instant identification all throughout the Web, but now Facebook is planning on extending that ease of identify transport to mobile sites and applications.
Already one of the most popular Web sites on the Internet, Facebook has quickly made itself out to be one of the most popular platforms on the mobile Web. Not only does this show Facebook’s great health, but it also (once again) indicates an increasing inclination of users towards mobile Internet.
Steven Loeb
