Facebook mobile users surpass desktop users for first time. CEO Mark Zuckerberg: "In 2012, we connected over a billion people and became a mobile company. " Facebook announced its latest earnings on Wednesday For the first time there are more mobile active users than people checking Facebook on the WebThe company is getting better at making money off of mobile as well, with a boom in mobile ads (CNN) -- For the first time, the number of active daily visitors checking Facebook on mobile devices is higher than the number of people checking the social network on the Web. Overall, the company says there are 1.06 billion active Facebook users in the world. Of those, 618 million of them are visiting daily and 157 million are doing it from mobile devices.
The company's focus on putting mobile first, with new apps and features, is paying off. "In 2012, we connected over a billion people and became a mobile company," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement announcing the fourth-quarter results. Study: Some Facebook users envious. Hello. What do you want? — Future Tech/Future Market. We’re all mobile now. And, according to the chattering marketing class (within which I’m sometimes included), this year — or next year, but for sure the one after that — will be the “year of mobile.”
As I will keep saying until I’m blue in the face, the “desktop” as we know it will go away sooner rather than later. So, let’s agree that mobile is super-duper important, shall we? Now, think about this: What you want from mobile, what publishers (read: mobile content makers) want, and what brands/marketers want from mobile are not necessarily the same thing.
Consumers want: -A seamless, home-outside-overseas-home again experience. Are they getting this? -Lots of great content for free (or as cheap as possible), instantaneously, all the time and everywhere. -One or two devices that serve all their needs. -Their phone to simply make life easier. Brands/Marketers want: -Ease of targeting. -Excellent data. -Real engagement. Publishers want: -Revenue. Your Mobile Phone Is The Least Social Device You Own. Editor’s note: Jack Krawczyk is Senior Product Marketing Manager at StumbleUpon, the discovery platform. Jack was a founding member of Google+ and tweets about stuff @JackK. No buzzwords are more prominent in today’s Silicon Valley lexicon than social and mobile. They’re so big that they have their own love-child buzzword, SoLoMo (social-local-mobile, the nerd equivalent of Brangelina).
Sadly for buzzwordians: mobile is not really social, in the consumption context anyway. Building for mobile requires us to dig deeper into the role it fills in our life. When we gather around a movie, TV or even use a desktop, we are carving out time and personally allocating our focus. Mobile does not get the same luxury. As we have personalized our media, we have decreased the number of people viewing it together. Build for Bursts – The New Mobile Way The unique nature of mobile requires us to develop for bursts in usage, rather than sustained usage as we have built for in other media.
Bringing Technologies To Mobile Applications. Editor’s note: GD (Ram) Ramkumar is a serial entrepreneur and computer scientist. He was founder and CTO of SnapTell (acquired by Amazon in 2009) and is now the Founder and CEO of Concept.io, a new mobile startup. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford. I started as a mobile entrepreneur in the pre-iPhone era in 2006 as the founder of SnapTell, the first successful mobile app in the image recognition space. SnapTell was acquired by Amazon’s subsidiary A9 in 2009.
The Key Lesson: Choose a problem and frame it well Our first product at SnapTell was a service that allowed consumers to send in a photo of a shelf tag in a store for comparison shopping. We learned quickly that this was not the right problem framing. I learned some lessons out of the experience. For a mobile app or product to turn into a sustainable business, it must support a daily use case that turns into a habit. Emerging Mobile App Opportunities The user goes about their daily life as they normally do. Conclusion. Mobile Is Where The Growth Is. If you look at any of the top web properties on comScore, Quantcast, Alexa or any other third party reporting service you will see that they all have been fairly flat over the first half of the year.
You might think that all these big web services are flatlining. We have seen this in our portfolio too. From board meeting to board meeting, we are seeing a similar pattern. Web is flattish. But mobile is growing like a weed. I alluded to this in a post last week where I wished for an aggregated audience measurement service across mobile and web. There is a significant shift going on this year, much more significant than we saw last year, from web to mobile. Mobile native services like Foursquare & Instagram have the most to gain from this transition.
Mobile does not reward feature richness. That is why Facebook should (and it looks like will) break its big monolithic web app into a bunch of small mobile apps. In technology the more things change, the more the stay the same.