Every smartphone wants to become a Facebook Phone. (Translation)

Can Facebook position itself as the center of a new mobile Internet?

Most recently, Facebook hosted the "Developer Day for Mobile Platforms" - an invitation-only meeting. The main theme of the event was the habitual “praise” of the company's platform. I sat and listened to how Doug Purdy, director of product development, talked about integrating Facebook into all kinds of mobile applications, but I heard and realized at the same time a much deeper vision of the company in relation to the direction of the Internet, and how it plans to dominate it.
Over the past 10 years, we are accustomed to thinking of the words “Internet” and “Network” as synonyms. However, their meanings are not such, if we return to the roots. For many, the Internet is what we see in the browser. But do not forget that viewing HTML pages is just one of many ways to use the web that connects us all. In its development, Facebook has come to dominate this segment of the network, with a billion active users, driving huge traffic to other websites, becoming a social layer at the heart of the modern world.

The nature of the internet is changing

However, the essence of the Internet and the main role of the network is rapidly changing. The advent of huge ecosystems of powerful applications, provoked and supported by Apple iOS, has pulled a lot of our familiar online interactions from the network into applications. That is why so many rumors began to appear about the imminent demise of the "old network" and the decrease in the impact of desktop computers, the transition to mobile devices and applications.
To better understand the scale of the Internet’s changes, we’ll at least consider Instagram’s wild success. Its web presence is minimal, all interactions take place inside the mobile application. And only with its help, the company grew to 30 million users and was bought by Facebook for several hundred million dollars! What did this purchase mean? And the fact that Facebook not only understands the importance of sharing photos, but also recognizes the fundamental changes in the Internet. And it seems that they did not fail with this deal. Instagram recently overtook Twitter by the number of active users per day, and this growth is not slowing. And companies like Palm and Mozilla are still counting (surprisingly, with relatively little success) that "the network is always more convenient than your own application." Here is Google for example promotes its ChromeOS products as centralized web services for the masses who are not ready to completely switch to HTML5. The head of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, in a discussion about the "native" iOS Facebook application,admitted that "the company's biggest mistake is relying too reliably on HTML5 instead of native applications." This comment was regarded as an official statement that Facebook is already much more than just a website.
Purdy said, however, that Facebook is still not abandoning HTML5, but the web presence in general. After all, it’s worth understanding that there are about 7000 different devices, writing a “native” program for everyone is not an easy task. “The network is still a huge playing field for us,” Purdy emphasized.

Focusing on smartphones and apps

Without abandoning the web presence, Facebook is still aware that smartphones are the future. Focusing on the development of mobile devices naturally means the need to support the developers themselves. So, Facebook began to actively create an ecosystem of its own applications and aggressively build up its mobile platform. Now we have many tools that cling to the feed, the chronicle, the authorization system via Facebook, the pages of brands / groups / etc. And there is also a new powerful product - the Application Center, which allows these tools to be distributed.
The company's bet on a mobile platform was justified. Purdy said that 8 out of 10 of the largest iOS apps use Facebook tools for anything. And the Facebook App Center (Application Center) has already brought 180 million referrals to the Apple App Store and Google Play. There is even more impressive statistics - 40% of applications from Top iOS and Android have any integration with Facebook.
The statistics are very good, but even this does not fully satisfy Facebook’s ambitions in this area. Therefore, they held Developer Day for Mobile Platforms - to attract even more developers to study the principles of the Facebook platform.
Speaking about developers, Purdy briefly told the history of the Internet as a whole. Just as Google and Yahoo at one time helped us understand the organization of a huge number of web pages at the very beginning of the development of the network, Purdy explained the principle of operation of popular application stores for today's consumer.

“The main design principle of Facebook is not to interfere with the user”

Having ascended to the web of heaven, Facebook has introduced a new, “social” way of Internet discovery. Purdy says Facebook is “number one source of network traffic,” thanks to Facebook Connect’s tools for easy sharing of information, content, links ... “It's a word-of-mouth information transfer center on a global scale,” Purdy told developers and Facebook intends to become the same center for applications as it is on the network. Another Purdy quote about this:

“We will use the same sets of solutions for the mobile platform as for the web, as we are sure that they are applicable. We believe that application stores are very similar to the search engines that exist on the network at the moment, and we think that Facebook can be a good tool for mobile platforms, as it is for web pages. ”

Of course, application developers are more likely to pursue their own goals than the goal of "dominating" Facebook. The company naturally simplifies their life by providing a convenient and simple authorization system without the need to create a separate account or use “OAuth”, but the main bonus for developers is the platform’s growth opportunities. Facebook assures developers that the company's social content distribution tools also work well for apps. As a mantra, Purdy repeats these words: “Embed Facebook in your application and it will grow!” And another quote:

“We are developing a means by which developers and users could use one communication channel. In fact, the main design principle of Facebook is not to interfere with the user, just to help him share stories. ”

Hearing that the company is positioning itself as a “tool”, and even trying to “not interfere with the user,” is very encouraging. But for Facebook, such support for mobile developers is not just a gesture of goodwill. The company's benefit from the appeals of numerous applications is the filling of feeds, profiles, user chronicles with various information.

Unobtrusive Open Graph is still easy to abuse

Ideally for Facebook, we would use any application on our phone, and in the chronicle at that time activity would be displayed - undoubtedly useful, interesting, and potentially very important, which all friends would like to know about. The company wants to support the growth of just such applications, in which "the user is always in the spotlight," according to Purdy.
Such an “ideal option” sounds more like the worst nightmare for lawyers specializing in the protection of private information, but Facebook certainly understands people's caution in this matter and does everything possible to make the process of granting permissions less confusing and incomprehensible. The company has seriously improved this system over the years, but the privacy mechanism is still complex and opaque. Facebook could also have tighter control over the default settings of applications, which for most users are not comfortable. Early versions of Spotify integration taught us that the unobtrusive “Open Graph”easy to abuse. At the conference, there was a lawyer warning developers “not to force users to marry without going on a first date” when it comes to granting permissions. The burden of “making beautifully" of course lies with the developers.
If you postpone worries about the security of personal data, the new platform of the company is intriguing not by the possibility of filling user feeds, but by how much Facebook is woven into a new stage in the development of the Internet. We will call it the “Internet of mobile applications plus a worldwide network”. And Facebook is so intertwined that it’s easy to imagine a world in which the company better understands iOS and Android users than Apple and Google, respectively. Imagine: each of your applications has a connection with Facebook, add to this what the network already knows about you from your profile, etc. - suddenly, even the all-knowing Google, it turns out, understands you not so well ...

“The telephone is the most“ social ”thing of all that you have.”

So what could Facebook do with all this knowledge about you? The most obvious answer is advertising! A company could help developers place advertisements in the same manner as it helps with authorization and dissemination of information. Advertising is much more profitable and much less annoying if it is aimed at a specific audience and has a clear context related to our interests, and here Facebook has all the advantages in achieving this. And the first steps to using accumulated knowledge about applications for profit are already visible.
Facebook is actively encouraging developers to consider their applications part of the company's ecosystem. Given the scale of smartphones and the risk of being crowded out by competitors, it becomes clear why Purdy was so enthusiastic about how important Facebook plays in our lives:

“The phone is the most“ social ”thing of all that you have. All friends, everything you ever did, everything you want to share - everything on this device. The main role of Facebook is to provide the opportunity to share all this with friends. ”

I told Purdy that speaking about smartphones was so passionate that the company could think about releasing its own device. He laughed, and this laughter did not make an impression saying “wait for the news”, he rather refuted this idea. If the company manages to realize that planned level of deep integration, there will simply be no need to create a special Facebook Phone! After all, every smartphone with at least one application will become a Facebook Phone ...

Author : Dieter Bohn, editor of The Verge , original article November 16, 2012