The very first thing users will notice about the Facebook app is that it looks and functions a lot more like the website. Notifications are immediately visible and layers are used to provide instant views of friend requests, messages and notifications.

Facebook’s old Android app was notoriously slow, had multiple screens each of which took long to load even for simple functions and did not have a very intuitive interface. Even something as fundamental as viewing pictures and commenting on them was hidden and required users to know exactly where to touch to show the comment option.

It is now much quicker and easier for users to share photos, and messages as well as to navigate. According to a post on the Facebook blog, with this new app, photos and albums will be twice as fast as before. It will also be easier for users to edit their captions and view comments, both of which were tricky features to use in the old app.

Messages and notifications will now be placed at the top of the page, so users will be able to access them and respond tot hem without leaving the page.

Similarly, a new menu button on the top left corner of the app drops down a menu that enables users to access their news feeds, groups, games and apps with a single click, instead of having to leave the news stream and then go to the main menu.

These new features are for Android 1.8 and require Android 1.5 or later versions. The app continues to be available for free on the Android Market and still does not feature any Facebook ads.

Mobile Ads En Route?

Given that over 350 million active users (43% of Facebook’s total user base) currently access Facebook through their mobile devices, the platform is extremely important for the social network. It is no wonder then, that they would strive to make the user experience as good as it is on desktops.

It will also be no surprise when they do start monetising the medium and launch a mobile advertising service.

The latest report released by Opera, on the state of the mobile Web, indicates that a very large amount of mobile Web traffic is now being generated in India. Among the most popular uses of the mobile Web is to access the popular social network, Facebook, and also to access online videos. Another popular use of the mobile Web in India is for online shopping and online classifieds.

Popularity of the social network Orkut has been declining. While it was once very popular in India as well as Brazil, it is now on a downward trend in India, although it continues to be popular in Brazil.

In contrast, Orkut’s main competitor, Facebook has gained immense popularity in India. Orkut’s loss could be due to a lack of innovation in recent times. Google, the parent company of Orkut, has just launched a new social network Google Plus, which may change the situation in due course of time.

The top 10 mobile sites in India, ranked according to unique users since May 2010 are:

1. google.com
2. facebook.com
3. youtube.com
4. vuclip.com
5. orkut.com
6. mobile2day.com
7. wikipedia.org
8. zedge.net
9. getjar.com
10. filestube.com

Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder of Opera Software, says, “We see India standing tall as a country in rapid development, with Internet-based knowledge at the forefront of that growth. Furthermore, the mobile Web in India has evolved as an important place to do business, as the proportion of people going shopping on the mobile shows.”

According to the report, for one year between May 2010 and May 2011, India was placed at the number three slot as far as Opera Mini users are concerned. Incidentally, Opera handles about 60-65% of the mobile Web traffic in India. During this period, the number of page views per user has also gone up from 390 to 430.

Latin America continues to show steady growth as well. Between May 2010 and May 2011, the number of unique users in this region went up by 535%, the number of page views went up by 1,556% and the data transferred during this period went up by 1,041%.

Last September, rumours that Facebook was making its own mobile phone were fueled by posts on TechCrunch and Bloomberg. Both reported on tips from anonymous sources that Facebook had started making their own mobile phone. Facebook was supposedly manufacturing the required software, and the hardware was to be made by another manufacturer.

The continued growth and popularity that mobile social networking and Facebook in particular were enjoying made it seem logical that Facebook would try to integrate their apps into mobile phones. Since this was only possible if they had control over the operating system, it was believed that they would want to make their own handsets.

The rumours had even pinpointed two employees – Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos – who were supposed to be secretly working on the project.

Facebook was reported to be in talks with INQ Mobile to build the phone and AT&T was believed to be the chosen carrier, although nothing was finalised. The social network was supposedly considering the development of 2 handset models, one with a full QWERTY keyboard and the other with just a touch screen. The p hones were expected to be very reasonably priced.

These rumours were then laid to rest when a Facebook spokesperson clarified to Mashable that they were only interested in making mobile apps more social and not in building phones.

Now, the rumours have started afresh ever since a description of INQ’s new mobile phone surfaced. The description of the new phone was obtained via the Blutooth certification that was recently awarded to the device.

The new INQ phone is supposed to be an “Android smartphone built to make messaging faster and smarter”. It’s designed around the way people naturally communicate and has Facebook built into its core. The homescreen features multiple entry points to different Facebook functions, while a dynamic widget displays a feed of status updates, albums, videos and photos.

While a lot of the speculation leads one to believe that the original rumours were probably true, only a handful of people are in a position to verify the truth. Facebook did deny the rumours at the early stage. Though, that could be because it was probably too premature to admit to anything back in October. Whether Facebook denies this new set of rumours or not might give a better indication of the truth.

78% of smartphone users accessed their browsers in April 2010 and 80% of them accessed applications. By contrast only 19% of feature phone users accessed their browsers, and 17% accessed applications. But feature phone users still constitute almost half of all users who access their mobile browsers and applications.

In April 2010 there was a growth of 28% in the number of users accessing their applications on the phone. The figure was up to 69.6 million users.

Social networking through apps saw a growth of 240% and was up to 14.5 million users. Access to News Apps grew by 124% to 9.3 million users and Sports Information apps grew by 113% to 7.7 million users.

Mobile banking usage has also more than doubled over the last year, to nearly 5 million users. Online retail sites via browsers also grew by 47% to 7.3 million users.

In April, the number of mobile users accessing their browser also grew by 31% to nearly 73 million users. Social networking through browsers grew by 90% to almost 30 million users.

Mark Donovan, comScore senior Vice President of mobile says, “With mobile media consumption on the rise, the discussion of how consumers are accessing content – whether it is via application, browser or both – continues to be an important factor for companies looking to invest further in their mobile brands. Although application access is clearly on the rise, with several categories more than doubling their audience via this method, content consumption via browser continues to be the most popular method for Americans to access mobile media.”

In other words, brands and marketers need to take care of both categories of users while planning their campaigns, as they have an opportunity to grow through both channels.

Web 2.0, according to Juniper, includes common Web applications that individuals use to generate, consume and interact with digital content. It covers the social Web and other sites that prompt user interaction.

The growing involvement of users with the social Web has a substantial effect on the business models, development strategies and revenues of mobile service providers, equipment manufacturers and other players in the mobile industry.

Mobile Web 2.0 is somewhat different from traditional Web 2.0 due to the technical and physical constraints of mobiles, such as their relative inability to work with Flash and AJAX. As a result, Mobile Web 2.0 substantially lags behind the full-fledged Web 2.0 as far as its technological evolution is concerned.

The development of smartphones and the iPhone and the availability of various services on mobile – SMS, MMS, IM and VoIP – give mobile social media advantages, such as the immediacy of content sharing, which has helped the medium gain a lot of ground in the second half of 2009, and it continues to do so in 2010.

Services such as mobile messaging and mobile Internet browsing are growing rapidly. While such rapid growth raises concerns, it also leads mobile industry experts to believe that mobile social media can be monetised by means of contextual and location targeted advertising in conjunction with premium services and virtual goods.

In fact, Juniper’s studies have also found that mobile Web users are more willing to pay for services provided to them than desktop users are.

Currently, Web 2.0 on mobile is valued at $5 billion by Juniper Research. This value is estimated to go up almost 4 times by 2014.

The results show that 55% of mobile social networking users are women and only 45% are men.

While there are many who may be surprised and may even disagree with the findings at first glance, it seems quite likely on second thoughts, as women are generally known to be far more social than men and they like to keep in touch with their friends and family more frequently.

What is really surprising about this study, though, is the user demographic distribution by age.

The study shows that social networks are accessed through mobile devices most often by women in the 35-54 age group, (36%) and they are followed closely by the 25-34 age group(34%)

While most people would assume that teenagers or young adults would dominate the scene here, those in the 13-17 years category account for 7% and those in the 18-24 years category account for just 16% of mobile social network activity. Though teens do use the mobile a lot, it is mostly for the purpose of text messaging.

With the use of social sites like Twitter and Facebook having increased significantly in the last year, the use of mobile phones to keep up this activity even on the go is certainly expected to increase, especially due the the mobile’s inherent ability to help people stay in touch, at all times, in a variety of different ways.

Facebook Zero will be a stripped down, text-only version of the original social network. It will run on a lower bandwidth. The site will not allow access photos or videos. It will be a text-only site.

The popular social network, which has been growing rapidly, claims they now have over 100 million users a month on mobile alone, and this figure is expected to grow even further. This new version will help Facebook to free-up a lot of critical bandwidth.

Facebook Zero is likely to be offered to users free of charge, and then interested users can change over to a paying model with a multimedia service.

Almost half the time spent by users online on their mobiles is dedicated to Facebook. In December 2009, users in U.K. spent 2.2 billion minutes on Facebook through their mobile phones.

According to Brandee Barker, a spokesperson at Facebook, “[Facebook] are discussing it… as an option to make Facebook on the mobile Web available to everyone anywhere and allow operators to encourage more mobile Internet usage.”

A slimmed down version of Facebook, called Facebook Lite, is already available in places with slow Internet connections, such as in third world countries.

Facebook Zero will be launched in the coming weeks.

The GSMA is the industry association for mobile phone operators. It carried out a study on mobile Internet use in December 2009. The study showed that almost 16 million people in U.K. spent nearly 4.8 billion minutes on the mobile Internet and generated 6.7 billion page views between them. Of this, nearly 50% of the time people spent on the mobile Web was on Facebook.

The total number of mobile Internet users is likely to be much more than 16 million, as T-Mobile and 3 were not included in the survey. This data will be published shortly.

While Facebook was visited by almost 5 million users, it was closely followed by Google, which was used by 4.57 million users. Users did not spend anywhere near as much time on Google, though, as they did on Facebook.

The figures were released by the Mobile Media metrics service, which has been recently launched by the GSMA and comScore, to help various brands and agencies to set up their mobile ad campaigns and to judge the response they receive, to these campaigns.

Mobile marketing has definitely been on the upswing lately. Mobile commerce showed significant growth in the 2009 holiday season and reports predict that mobile Internet access will overtake PCs in 2013.

Orange U.K. users will now be able to send picture messages to each other, in addition to the usual text messages, through 86444 – the Twitter SMS number. Orange has created a new sub domain, called Snapshot, for this purpose:

Snapshot by Orange

Users who don’t currently use Twitter with Text Messaging will, have to first send the message saying ‘START’ to 86444. The same number is currently also used to tweet via SMS from the Vodafone and O2 networks and will be used for MMS tweeting as well.

Once the service has started, users will be able to click a photo on their mobile phone and then send it via MMS to 86444. The pictures will appear on the Orange Snapshot site and will be tweeted with a link to the image on the user’s Twitter stream.

Snapshot is similar in concept to Twitpic, one of the most popular photo-sharing applications associated with Twitter. The only advantage that Orange has is that their users will be able to send MMS tweets to the standard Twitter mobile number directly from their handsets.

Users will not be required to pay any additional fees to Twitter, for this service. Only the usual messaging charges of the service provider will apply.

As part of the deal between Twitter and Orange, Twitter will also be part of the Social Life service, along with Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. This is a service provided by Orange that allows mobile users to access all these social networks with a single log-in.

While Orange, Vodafone and O2 are now quite tuned in to Twitter, T-Mobile and 3 are yet to follow suit.

In January 2009, Facebook Mobile had a respectable 20 million users, which it had amassed since its launch about three years ago, in 2006. Now, they have suddenly accumulated 65 million users, as reported on The Facebook Blog.

This growth does not look likely to slow down, either, as Facebook has recently introduced Facebook Connect on mobiles.

Logging in on various websites, which is never easy on a mobile handset, will now be made much easier for Facebook users, just as it is on their computers.

Facebook Mobile was first launched as a very basic mobile service in the English language only, with basic features like status updates and photo uploads. The service is now available in more than 60 different languages and has features such as Facebook SMS and several others incorporated in it.

Facebook mobile has two portals – m.facebook.com, which can be used on any handset and x.facebook.com, which is to be used on touch-screen handsets such as the iPhone, Android G1 and Palm.

Social implications of Google Latitude are obvious. The product sets the base for what could be an extensive geo-spatially aware mobile social network with the potential to deliver extremely targeted ads to users depending on their current location.
The latter application, MyTracks, does not have as far-reaching potential, though. However, it is  definitely highlighting what could become a pattern for forthcoming Google Mobile launches.

Outdoor sports enthusiasts such as bikers, skiers and runners should be particularly thrilled with the latest offering. The service, which works on Android powered phones such as T-Mobile’s G1, keeps track of a user’s path, by means of the mobile phone’s GPS.

It also provides details such as speed, elevation and distance covered. These details can then be downloaded to a spreadsheet using Google Docs or to Google Maps. Once that is done these details can be forwarded to friends through email or Twitter. The application is free to use.

Earlier, GPS devices required the user to plug in a separate device into the computer, install special; software and then transfer the track to the web by uploading it. All this cumbersome activity has been eliminated. Now, a user just needs to carry an Android phone when outdoors.
My Tracks will then offer details such as recording and visualising the track followed during any outdoor activities such as running, jogging, cycling and hiking. It will also give the total time taken, the average speed, distance covered, elevation and so on.
Users can forward these details to other members in their groups so that others can follow the same trail or avoid certain dangerous spots.

http://mytracks.appspot.com/

The potential for greatness definitely lies withing mobile social activity. If the user numbers are any indication, this is where the future of mobile might lie. And Google seems to be right on track to cash in on this growing market.

Latitude works with Google Maps on mobile handsets as well as on a desktop. Users who add this service on iGoogle or download the latest version of Google Maps on their mobile phones can join Latitude and then invite their friends to join. If the friends accept and share their location, they can see where they are, in real time, on the map.

The system makes use of a digital map, where the coordinates of the handset being used are plotted by triangulating the location of the nearest mobile communications towers. This is merely an extension of their My Location service that was launched in December 2007.

The service has its benefits above and beyond the obvious social aspect of knowing where one’s friends are. For example, people can keep track of each other in a very large gathering, or parents can keep an eye on their childrens’ whereabouts.

There are concerns that using such a service would allow Google to invade an individual’s privacy. As David Perez of Arete Consulting put the point across succinctly, “I do not want my mother to know where I am!”.

Users have the choice to accept or refuse an invitation to join the service. A user’s location is revealed only to those members whose invitation has been accepted. Moreover, one can also choose to change the privacy settings for individual contacts in their friends list. Users can also manually input a fake location if they wish to hide their true location from a particular contact.

While Latitude is free to use, Google will most likely start serving location-based advertising to monetise the service.

At present, the service is available on Android phones like the T-Mobile G1, iPhone and iPod touch devices, most colour BlackBerries, Windows Mobile 5.0+, Nokia Smartphones and Java-enabled mobile phones in 27 countries including the USA, most of Europe and India.

Business Week reports that Motorola has invested $50 million in their Android Social Phone project, which will be managed by Motorola-owned mobile email company, Good Technology.
Motorola will require at least 6 months before they are ready to launch their new phone. They have not even announced a name for it as yet.

The phone is expected to have a touch screen like the iPhone, and a slide out QWERTY key board like the HTC T-Mobile G1. The look, though, is expected to be on the lines of the Motorola Krave, and it is likely to be cheaper than the G1 phone, at around $150.

The G1 phone is already capable of transferring contacts from ones Gmail account into the phone. It is likely that Motorola’s Android phone may take this one step further by tieing up with Facebook and or MySpace, to enable transferring contacts from these social networks into the phone’s address book. This would also enable users to check status updates and activity streams on the phone itself. Facebook has a similar facility with the iPhone, but they require a separate app for this, which may not be necessary on Motorola’s Android.

Whether people will be really keen on getting Facebook or MySpace on their phones or not will decide the future of the Android Social phone and indirectly that of Motorola too.

Though Motorola is the third largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world, their mobile phone division has made losses to the tune of $1.9 million in the last year and is desperately in need of another success story like the RAZR. They hope the Android phone might be just the thing they need.

Yahoo! oneConnect will enable communication via different means such as email, text messaging (SMS), instant messaging (IM) etc. all through mobile phones.

Yahoo! oneConnect

The service will allow users to stay up to date with all their contacts at all times. In other words, Yahoo! oneConnect will be the first service which integrates email, IM, SMS and social networks. Its features include:

• Socially connected address book, allowing users to see all recent activity, photo uploads, etc. across all networks
• Integration of IM and SMS across Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger etc.
• Recent status updates of the user and all his/her contacts on social networks
• Pulse – a dynamic overview of recent actions of friends on social networks
• Favorites – develop messaging shortcuts to reach the most frequent contacts faster
• Social contact card – ability to store all relevant information about all contacts
• Location sensing technology to alert users when contacts are nearby
• Open communications platform bringing the ability to communicate through multiple means including IM, SMS etc.

The above mentioned specifications are still under consideration and are by no means finalised. Several changes may have to be made before the service is actually introduced. Yahoo! oneConnect is expected to be available by the second quarter of 2008, on Yahoo! Go3.0 and on Yahoo!’s new mobile home page.

This is a great step for the future of mobile communications, as it will enable people to stay totally connected even while on the move.