Monday, February 6, 2012 at 5:36 pm

Facebook’s Mobile Problem Isn’t Ads — It’s The Product

In a well-circulated New York Times article, Jenna Wortham notes that Facebook doesn’t make any money from mobile. Despite a ton of mobile users — about half of its 845 million monthly users — it’s going to be a significant challenge for Facebook to build a mobile business that’s nearly as good as its web business.

The more immediate problem, I’d say, is that Facebook’s mobile product is rather boring today.

Its current iOS app is basically a chopped-up version of its website, but not in a way that’s particularly interesting. I’ve been a full-on Facebook addict at my Mac since 2004, but not on my phone or iPad. Photos are small in the news feed, pretty much everything needs to open up and load in a new window, and it’s just not very fun. When I have time to waste with my phone, my first choices are always Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, and the App Store — Facebook is always an afterthought.

Maybe the mix of people I follow on Twitter and Instagram is just more interesting and funnier than the “real friends” I try to limit my Facebook feed to? (Sorry, real friends!) But I don’t think that’s the whole story. I think Facebook just isn’t very inventive these days when it comes to mobile.

What should Facebook on my phone be like? What would be more interesting? I confess I don’t have the answer to that, so I feel a little whiny here. If I did, I’d probably be building it, or at least shipping a wireframe off to Mark Zuckerberg with my job application. But I’ll know it when I see it. And so far, I’m not seeing it.

My hope is that Facebook has been pushing out small updates to its current mobile apps because it’s working on a much deeper vision for mobile, which is taking a lot longer. Zuckerberg just seems too ambitious for this not to be the case. And it’s not like Facebook is doing poorly at mobile in the meantime, or facing any crazy competition. It’s just not demanding my attention the way I’d like it to.

Even though I’m holding a higher bar for Facebook, I don’t think I’m asking too much. As I’ve said a number of times, as web usage gradually shifts toward mobile devices, Facebook’s biggest risk is that a mobile-first or mobile-only competitor will show up and steal our time.

As the incumbent, Facebook has many advantages, such as our friend connections, name recognition, photos, carrier deals, and years of data. But I probably could have said most of those things about Friendster at one point. So let’s see something more exciting!

Related: Instagram Is Quickly Becoming The Next Great Social Network

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  • http://www.twitter.com/danprobinson Dan Robinson

    A-MEN! Couldn’t sympathize more with my addiction to Facebook on the web and boredom with it on mobile. Based on the Times article I think it’s reasonable to think your hope of a more ambitious mobile version of Facebook is true. And that vision likely involves ads.

    As an app maker, I HOPE Facebook finds a non-invasive way of putting ads into it’s mobile products that users are OK with so that the rest of us can follow in their lead. If the Facebook app has ads, it’s OK for all apps to have ads.

  • Graham Stanton

    Fascinating. Zuckerberg talks a lot about how the best apps on the Facebook platform should be “social by design” rather than apps that try to bolt social onto an existing service. Facebook isn’t applying that same thinking to the mobile realm.

  • http://tumblrer.com snissen

    One tangential thing I think worth considering is load time. I would like to use Facebook on my iPhone — having a half-decent app has definitely increased the time I spend with the service. But unless I’m on wifi, I can’t bear to wait to load a photo. Even when other websites and apps (like Spotify) will render what’s asked of them, Facebook still very
    often wont load.
    Of course, this is only anecdotal …

    Facebook.com is also slow, relative to, say, Google search results on a desktop. But “somewhat slow” on a landline is certainly easier to deal with.

    • http://www.fromedome.com/ Dan Frommer

      I feel the same way, which is a little ironic, because Facebook’s far superior load time on the web many years ago is what got me and a lot of other people to fully ditch MySpace, Friendster, etc.
      Facebook can’t do much to control the crappiness of our wireless networks (unless it buys T-Mobile!) and it’s not like Instagram and other photo apps don’t suffer from it, too. Heck, sometimes it takes several minutes of walking to find a patch of coverage in Brooklyn where my phone can even send an email. Perhaps that’s why Facebook doesn’t even try to display full-width photos in the news feed?

  • http://www.itvale.com Saad Fazil

    This is the downside of being dominant on the web; since FB didn’t really start as mobile first, it is inherently hard for it to be more fun than the likes of Path, Foursquare, Instagram etc. (We can say something similar about Yelp vs. Foursquare btw). I see possibly three solutions to this problem:

    - forget the web parity. As long as FB tries to match the mobile features with those on the web, it will be extremely difficult for it to make something more interesting than say Path. It’s a hard choice though: users come to expect most if not all features on the mobile that they can find on the web, and features on the web are just out of control! FB Groups, apps, news feed, ads, check ins, photos, freinds’ profiles, and many more! Compare this against Instagram or Foursquare.. Instagram is pictures only, and 4square is check-ins only — for the most part.

    - launch more trimmed down apps in addition to the mainstream app. Imagine an app just do a photo upload, which borrows some of the FB features (friends etc.) but not all. The risk of course is that FB loses the network effects to some extent.. and this is a hard story to tell advertisers (hey 50% of our users are on the mainstream app and 25% on app B and so on!). And of course the dev cost goes up.

    - FB App Store: if launched on Android (sort of what Amazon has done), could be extremely popular. Not sure how it aligns with FB’s HTML5 plans though