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Over the past day or so Facebook has begun heavily promoting their mobile services through ads on the site which all link to a new Facebook mobile landing page. They are trying to alert users to the robust set of mobile features that they currently have available including the ability to send messages directly to users, something both Facebook and Twitter have offered since early on. Whether or not users are actually substituting one service for the other (Twitter for Facebook), Facebook is clearly stepping up their communications campaign against the rapidly growing startup.
In addition to stepping up their communications campaign, Facebook is rolling out new features, most recently the addition of mobile support for public profiles. In addition to being able to become a fan of a public profile, administrators can also update the statuses of public profiles from their mobile devices. Social networking is going mobile and Facebook understands that.
That’s why the company is promoting their mobile services so heavily now. I would guess that Facebook would also like to reduce the number of people texting 40404 (Twitter’s mobile code) to update their status and get them using Facebook’s mobile services via 32665. Facebook has also extended their mobile services to include access to a user’s feed via http://m.facebook.com.
Facebook’s text features also appear to have been extended but I’ll have to confirm that with Facebook first. Facebook has been promoting a lot of their internal features with their remnant inventory but this is the first time that their mobile solutions have shown up in advertisements. While this is not just a move against Twitter, it has become difficult to not view most of Facebook’s moves through the Twitter versus Facebook paradigm given all the recent buzz about the company.
Have you been using Facebook’s mobile services? Do you use their texting capabilities for updating your status or do you typically use Twitter instead? Thanks to Jason McGowan for the tip.
Update
According to Facebook this promotion has been around for 3 weeks. One other interesting statistics is that their mobile users are 50 percent more active than regular web users. Regardless of Twitter, Facebook is working heavily to expand their mobile presence as they now have over 30 million active mobile users.
Couple of problems with Facebook Mobile. 1) I uploaded a photo from my cell yesterday, and it took 2 hours to show up on FB. 2) m.facebook.com is not always updated timely, esp. when it comes to looking at your own wall.
I run a couple pages for a casino and restaurants and would love to take advantage of the mobile “become a fan” feature, yet I do not have a vanity URL so potential fans cannot use this feature. I have also noticed that if you become a fan via mobile, you automatically follow that page via SMS. Any news on the expansion of the vanity URL offerings?
Look for the help pages. One topic is, How to get Vanity Url.
That will help you.
Make facebook update very easy.
Cool..
Would be useful, if they would begin supporting more European Cell phone carriers, considering each time I try to send a photo from my phone I am told my number is not valid.
And would be greatly helpful if they would begin providing applications for non-Blackberry and non-Apple phones. Specifically, Nokia.
The mobile website is less useful than ever once you become accustomed to filtering your news feeds. The mobile site just gives you one big ugly newsfeed.
It is difficult to access on my Nokia mobile via GPRS. but i think the better news is that they have some of the features being combined with mobile service provider Tata Indicom in India - which is i believe also part of their marketing.