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Facebook Focuses On Feature Phone

Can the success of Facebook's mobile strategy rest on something so passé as the feature phone? Well, keeping in mind that the devices are still used by most consumers worldwide, the answer should be obvious.

"We want people to have a great mobile experience no matter what type of phone they carry," writes Mark Heynen, mobile program manager at Facebook, in a new blog post. "Smartphones have offered better features for sharing with friends but aren't used by most people around the world."

"While many tiny companies devote all their resources to building cutting-edge apps only accessible to the relatively well-off tier of users with smartphones, the huge-by-comparison Facebook puts its effort into mobile as a growth opportunity," writes NetworkEffect.

As such, Facebook on Thursday debuted a new feature-phone app, which NetworkEffect calls "kind of a gateway drug for both Facebook participation and mobile data usage."

This past summer, as Computerworld notes, Facebook's mobile products chief Eric Tseng said mobile was the company's biggest growth engine. Facebook, therefore, doesn't have time to wait around for every consumer to upgrade to a smartphone.



According to Silicon Valley designer Luke Wroblewski, there's even a poster in Facebook's headquarters, which reads: "You Don't Get To 500 Million Mobile Users Without A Few Feature Phones."

What's more, as Business Insider notes, "More people have mobile phones than have the internet, and most of those people are in the developing world ... Being at the ground level of this huge trend is a really big deal for Facebook."



On the news, ReadWriteWeb asks: "How long will it take for Facebook to reach 1 billion users now that it can reach the entire feature phone bearing world?"

Read the whole story at NetworkEffect et al »

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