Facebook Redefining the Mobile Internet
A few weeks ago, the research and analytics firm Hitwise (part of Experian) made headlines by announcing that Facebook had trumped Google as the most visited web site in the US with a slightly over 7 % share of all web hits.
While this announcement (and the methodology behind it in particular) has caused quite a bit of debate, we believe this is still very significant news.
When you combine this milestone with the stellar growth of mobile Facebook usage (it quintupled from 20 million active users in January 2009 to over 100 million users in January 2010), we definitely have something to think about.
Why we think this matters
We think it is fair to say Facebook is really the first smart phone killer app for the masses. We have actually heard people ask how well one can use Facebook on a particular phone instead of speaking about the mobile browsing experience. A case in point was a Las Vegas cab driver on a recent trip who was cursing his Blackberry because it had a bad Facebook experience.
When 100+ Million people start doing this, it will have a profound effect on what is expected of mobile phones. Facebook is no longer just a web site, it is actually starting to define the user experience of the mobile Internet or perhaps even smart phones and feature phones to a degree. This, in turn, will have a direct effect on what kind of phones people want and buy.
Facebook is also the application that teaches the great masses to grab a phone not only to call or text but also to see what is going on. This should be good new for other mobile apps as they can move ahead on this path blazed by Facebook.
Artturi,
While I mostly agree with Your statement of Facebook “teaching masses”, personally I do not believe that FB has “caught it” yet though. I am quite sure that there will be something else that will make it to happen and change the way of behavior of the masses.
Most likely, there will be a combination of services for a named target groups (e.g. Facebook and LinkedIn and similar) _and_ some bridge in between those services that close the gap in between “multiple” different social network “hubs”…. There will be something horizontal over these vertical target groups
I agree with Jari that social networking services will certainly evolve rapidly over the coming years and FB is not the only player in town.
The points I’d like to stress out are:
a) the fast usage growth of social networking services over mobile,
b) how the phenomenon is educating huge masses to use all kind of services over mobile, and
c) social networking is impacting how we choose the next handset and data plan
d) Facebook is currently the clear leader among social networks with over 100 million active mobile users
To support my observations I refer to a week old Groundtruth report – social networking accounts for 59.83 percent of all Mobile Internet usage:
“Social networking’s popularity on any platform is not contested. But like many of the burning questions in the mobile world, we have been relying upon speculation, gossip and guesswork to understand the magnitude of social networking’s dominance over the Mobile Internet.
Until now. And it’s big.
In fact, today’s release reports that it accounts for 59.83 percent of all Mobile Internet usage. And as we have found in other categories, consumers engage most with those sites that are created for mobile use, with MocoSpace and AirG users spending more than an hour and a half per week on these sites; nearly an hour more on average than the PC-optimized sites like Facebook and MySpace.
As they say, the truth is stranger than fiction.”
See more here.