Most people access the Internet using mobiles. Many use Facebook from mobiles. Our research in Java showed that people at the BOP were beginning to call Internet Facebook. Yet, Facebook does not know how to monetize mobile products?
“We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven,” the company said in its review of the risks it faces.
In a world that is rapidly moving toward an era of mobile computing, this is a troubling issue for Silicon Valley’s brightest star — particularly since much of Facebook’s growth right now is in countries like Chile, Turkey, Venezuela and Brazil, where people largely have access to the Internet using cellphones.
Facebook is not the only company struggling to translate the success of its Web site to mobile devices, where screen space is at a premium and people have little patience for clutter or slow loading times. It is a problem that plagues companies as diverse as news publishers and the streaming radio service Pandora, and it is likely to loom larger. There were more global shipments of smartphones than of personal computers in 2011, according to a recent report from Canalys, a research firm.
Comments are closed.