Currently a web company, Facebook expects itself to become a mobile company within a year or two. It appears the company just wants to emphasise that it will be prioritising the mobile experience also, because about 43.75 per cent of Facebook users access the site from their mobile handsets.
Erick Tseng, head of mobile products at Facebook told CNET that Facebook would be as much a mobile company within the next two years as it would be a web company.
It is not clear how this would happen though.
Erick Tseng also repeated how 350 million users of Facebook are accessing the service from their mobiles, whereas the total number of users of the social network stands at 800 million, which means Facebook can soon expect about half its users to access the service from their mobile phones. Facebook considers itself more as a platform on which it would serve those service providers who want to add social components to their applications and services.
The company notes that mobile usage is growing faster than ever, and that there are regions such as India, Africa and Southeast Asia where citizens do not have access to computers but where cell phones are handy and could be used to access Facebook.
Facebook is also pleased with its acquisition of Israel based company Snaptu, which specialises in rendering mobile webpages quicker. The project itself is called Facebook for every phone and it works on about 2,500 phones across the world. iPhone users, though, still have to download their Facebook App but chances are Facebook might already be hard at work to fill the gap.
Interestingly, whenever Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive officer of Facebook, has been asked about the possibility of Facebook phones, he has always been clear that there would be none.
This indicates that the company just wants to integrate Facebook in every possible phone — and in a deep way. Many phones have physical Facebook buttons as well which make it easier for users to share or connect to the social network. Some Facebook phones are HTC Salsa, HTC Chacha, and one from British phone maker INQ, now also owned by HTC.