Facebook Mobile Sees 3X Growth to 15 Million Users This Year
Facebook announced last night that the company has seen users of its mobile site, m.facebook.com, jump from 5 million to 15 million this year. The most recent change made to the site, allowing comments to be posted on status messages from your phone, resulted in more than 1 million mobile posts in the first 24 hours.
While these numbers are still relatively small compared to the total number of Facebook users (under 10%), it's huge for mobile social networking. Facebook has a really good mobile site and it looks like it's only getting better.
Context
Facebook Mobile is now probably bigger than the entire userbase of Mixi, Japan's leading social network and a site that is very frequently accessed by mobile. Last week 6 leading Japanese social networks, including Mixi, MySpace Japan, Yahoo and others, announced that the companies are forming a mysterious alliance that could include content and widget sharing across their mobile sites.
We're curious how that kind of strategy will work compared to Facebook's strategy of building up a huge siloed web based social network and then creating a simple but extremely usable mobile version.
Commenting
It's interesting to see Facebook highlight the addition of commenting to its mobile interface. Non-users might not recognize what a big deal this is, but anyone who regularly uses mobile social networks (this authors' favorite is FriendFeedToGo) knows how frustrating it is to view but not interact with friends' content on your mobile. It's hugely liberating to be able to comment from your phone; it's a game changer, a feature that helps the technology move from not being worth using to being a pleasure to use.
It's early days for mobile social networking, but it's great to see market leader Facebook making great moves in feature development and user growth.
Thanks to the always-fabulous mobile blog Textually for bringing this announcement to our attention.
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People are still blogging about Facebook. I thought the Facebook fad was over. So what if they got a gazillion users, they still make no money.
This does not surprise me at all; mobile content is finally starting to pick up as both Google and Apple are promoting phone products. This is going to be HUGE in the next 5 years!
Jesse W.
http://www.subprimeblogger.com
m.facebook.com m.brightkite.com m.hi5.com... See a pattern there ? These minimalist ultra-efficient versions of those services make them usable on even the most underpowered browsers on the most oversubscribed GPRS network. They are what WAP was supposed to be. I would hazard that they will grow even more as users realize that their phone can do it too. The "sent via Facebook Mobile" icon added on mobile originated messages certainly does wonders to spread the word among them.
There ain't gonna be 150 million people on Farcebook this year. Unless you think there really are 2000 Ron Jeremy's or 6000 Barrak Obama's or even TWO Angelina Jolie's in the world. There are currently 120 million accounts managed by 40 million actual people.
Toby - Do you have a link?
With all this growth, we are not far from becoming a society dependable 100% of technology. Would that be good or bad? Who knows!!