Last night, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave his first interview since Facebook’s float.
In particular he gave an update on the importance of mobile to Facebook’s future. He revealed that his letter to investors of more than 2,000 words was written on a mobile, and stated that “on mobile we are going to make a lot more money than on desktop”.
Of particular interest were his comments on HTML5. Facebook sees HTML5 and the mobile web as key going forward, but he admitted that their intense focus on HTML5 had led to a mistake in not initially producing a true “native app” for Facebook on iOS. Over the last few weeks Facebook have updated their iOS Facebook app with a version that did not simply re-use the HTML5 code from their mobile web site, and which was therefore much faster on an iPhone.
This makes a lot of sense. Businesses with the resources to build native apps as well as mobile web apps for mass deployment can provide a better user experience by doing so. For Facebook, there is an expectation of excellence in their mobile apps, while their mobile web presence is the glue that holds the user experience together across different devices and operating systems.
Bango technology is used to collect payments in native apps, as has been demonstrated for almost 2 years in Blackberry App World, as well as to power payment on the mobile web. Bango first demonstrated this frictionless mobile web billing for Facebook at Mobile World congress earlier this year, and has since launched in the USA, Germany and UK.