Our blog about mobile technology, and other ramblings

Archive - Subscribe - Posted 5 months ago

Facebook Mobile: 100 Million and Counting

Facebook announced last week that 100 Million of its 400 Million subscribers now actively use the service from their mobile device. That is an increase of 35 Million users from just six months ago, when the figure stood at 65 Million.

As mobile network operators struggle to cope with this level of growth, Facebook has announced plans to release another mobile version of its service they call Facebook Zero.

It is a low-bandwidth mobile site aimed at people using Facebook on their mobile phones, and may help to free-up critical bandwidth on mobile networks.

Facebook Zero omits data intensive applications like photos and can therefore be used to encourage mobile internet usage, while at the same time limit the strain on mobile networks.

This comes at a time when mobile network operators are struggling to cope with the growth in usage of mobile offerings from sites such as Facebook.

In December of last year and in the UK alone, mobile users viewed a total of 6.7 billion pages and spent more than 4.8 billion minutes (60 million hours) online via their mobile phones.

Time Spent Online via Mobile (Dec ‘09)*

- Facebook; 2.2bn minutes
- Google sites; 395m minutes
- Microsoft sites; 165m minutes
- Orange sites; 138m minutes
- AOL (and Bebo); 106m minutes
- Apple; 104m minutes
- Vodafone; 89m minutes
- BBC sites; 83m minutes
- Flirtomatic; 54m minutes
- Yahoo sites; 48m minutes

*Source: GSMA/Comscore