250 million active users across the globe access the site on their handsets.
Sucheta Sanghvi owns an iPad, BlackBerry smartphone, laptop and a home desktop and the most used application across platforms is Facebook. The 36-year-old homemaker and amateur pastry chef believes: “The Facebook app on my BlackBerry is probably my most critical tool. I share my recipes, food pictures and even connect with friends using the same app. I don’t even have to access emails to keep up with what is happening around my world — it is all shared on Facebook.”
Smartphone analytics firm Smartmobi says Indian users access Google Search and Facebook the most from their handsets. “Facebook on mobile has seen an 11 per cent increase in traffic over the six-month period, while Google.com traffic shows a drop of four per cent. The reason for Facebook’s success could be the growing need to network and ease of sharing information.”
Facebook is aware of the development. There are more than 250 million active users across the globe accessing the site on their mobile devices. India has over 840 million mobile subscribers (or 70 per cent of the population) in May 2011, and almost 59 per cent of all users access the internet using mobile web, estimates MobiThinking.
Recently, the world’s largest social network also collaborated with Snaptu to launch Facebook for Feature Phones, an app that will be available for download on 2,500 handsets, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson and LG. Cashing in on the craze are telecom operators such as Reliance, Aircel, Airtel and Idea that are offering Facebook mobile application for up to 90 days without data charges.
One such user is Gurgaon-based Shipra Jena, who works at Aptara Techbooks. She maintains that Facebook is her favourite app on mobile phone. “The additional features such as ‘places’ (where users indicate their location or share maps of places they visit in real time), ‘chat’ (virtual chat with friends), ‘tagging’ and uploading pictures, among others, only make the app more endearing.”
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Facebook for Feature Phones app aims to provide non-smartphone users similar experience to that of smartphone users, offering standard Facebook features like News Feed and Inbox messages and letting users upload photos and find friends from their phone contacts.
For Maruti Indoria, a Sify executive, Facebook app scores above all other social networking apps and hopes to see Facebook’s social games to come to the mobile app platform soon. “I would like to see better ways of notification when someone updates a Facebook group that is currently not addressed in Facebook’s BlackBerry app that I use. Also, mobile apps do not feature the Facebook games we play on the site.”
While the three million users from India have been making news about Google’s latest social networking site, Google Plus, Facebook with 30 million users in India has been swiftly adding to its mobile features to woo its share of mobile subscribers.
Facebook for iPhone has been among the most downloaded apps on Apple’s smartphone since its launch in 2009, with 84 million active users, or roughly half of all iPhone and iPod touches in use today.
But the social media site makes no purchasing revenue directly from its mobile presence. On PCs, users can buy virtual items within Facebook apps such as FarmVille, and the social media site gets its share from developers. MobiThinking data suggests that by 2015, more than 400 million people in India will purchase digital goods via mobile devices.
Close to 43 per cent Indian women subscribers actively use social networking apps, against 38 per cent male mobile subscribers, says a global study by Nokia.
The study results are reflected in the way Shruti Chellary, a 24-year old Cornell University student, spends hours on her iPhone’s Facebook app. “My friends are scattered all over the globe and Facebook is the only site where we all share pictures and locations where we hung out. I do hope the mobile app will soon have social games that we play online on Facebook with friends. Facebook’s video chat feature also needs to be integrated into mobile apps.”
While Facebook is trying to do everything to extend its social graph using the mobile web and on every mobile operating system, Google’s latest social networking salvo Google Plus is also fast making inroads on the mobile platform.
Deepen Rathi, an independent real estate dealer, downloaded the Google Plus iOS app on his Apple iPhone the day it was launched. “The first thing I noticed was that the mobile app does not have the Hangout feature, or video group chat, which is a web-only feature Google Plus. Huddle, a group instant messaging tool fills the gap and it is very handy for me as I can update my clients on latest real estate deals with this tool, for free.”
With inputs from Sarmistha Neogy