Facebook's mobile future

Facebook's upwardly mobile migration drew a lot of attention this week after their developer blog announced that they were expanding the Facebook Connect program across the mobile web. Facebook Connect has been popular on the iPhone for six months and Hitwise attributes the FB 'portable identity' as a driving factor in Facebook's dramatic push past MySpace. 65 million FB users are mobile (one of every four), and their counts are up significantly from the mere 20 million of eight months ago.

ReadWriteWeb summarized Facebook's efforts to become the social thread across mobile apps. A quick and dirty FB app for Android phones was also released this week, developed in part by Google in order to stake some claim on the huge and growing market. Digital Beat predicted that social media would have a significant impact on mobile usage as people will use the recommendations of friends rather than sifting through huge app catalogs such as the iPhone store.

Perhaps the surest sign that something big is happening came from GigaOM, who listed the pleas from data carriers that FB do something to ease the pressure on their systems and their profit margins.

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