Facebook Needs Strategy For Billions Of Mobile Social Networkers

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By the end of 2011, there will be 550 million people worldwide using their mobile phones to engage in social networking, says ABI Research. And by 2016, that number will explode to 1.7 billion as mobile platforms become the predominant way to access these services.

But such rapid growth is not all good news for the undisputed leader in social networking, Facebook, ABI analysts contend.

"A huge problem for Facebook is that while on the Web, it is a platform -- on mobile, it's just another application," says Senior Analyst Aapo Markkanen. While Facebook has a massive presence on mobile, the company has not had a proven ad strategy for monetizing that activity, he warns. Worse, both Google and Apple appear to be making headway in integrating basic social networking functions into their competing operating systems.

Unlike Facebook and its legacy as a Web site, Google+ was designed from the ground up with mobile integration in mind; it hooks more seamlessly into the core functions of the Android operating system. Likewise, ABI expects Apple's partnership with Twitter in the next iteration of the iOS operating system to be especially attractive to developers.

The Twitter integration will give developers a verifiable social identity that can be used for new ways of personalizing apps and creating new ad products.

With Google and Apple both building social networking functionality into their respective OSes in ways that benefit Facebook rivals, the current leader in the space will need to rethink its approach on mobile. "To strengthen its hand in the short term, we expect Facebook to aggressively take advantage of HTML5, but in the longer term, it should absolutely become a mobile operating system of its own," says Markkanen. A Facebook phone? Well, back in 2006 didn't we chuckle about a Google phone, too?

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