Facebook opens consumers' eyes to mobile

More and more people are accessing Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/) from their cellphones. This growing trend may well be one of the key factors in revolutionising the usage of the internet from cellphones in South Africa.

If you're asking "what's Facebook?" read on. If you know what it is, you may be surprised to find out just how big it is in South Africa and why it's changing the way people use their cellphones.

To start, Facebook is a social networking site. It was started on February 4, 2004 by the Harvard grad, Mark Zuckerman. By the end of that month, more than half of the undergraduate population at Harvard were registered on the service.

It then expanded to other universities and then around the world. Each person lists their interests, education and employment to whatever degree of detail they want. You then search for people under those criteria - people you went to school or university with, people you worked with, or have the same interests as you. Once you find them you add them to your friends list.

You can then upload photographs to Facebook, write notes, write on someone's "wall" leaving them a message, state your mood or what you are up to, post movie reviews and much more. Unless it is a private message to someone, everything you do is communicated to your contacts on their home page creating multiple points of contact.

Size of Facebook

Facebook now has well over 30-million people and is growing at a rate of about 750.000 people per week world-wide. In South Africa, the South Africa network currently totals 221.539 people. Many South Africans have not joined the network so there could be double that number on Facebook. Of those on the South Africa network, 45% are male, 40% female and 15% have not stated their gender

Many of these people will spend as much as two hours a day on Facebook. And many corporates are now banning Facebook access from offices saying their employees spend too much time on it.

The power of mobile

What corporates don't realise is that this is just growing Facebook even faster - forbidden fruit always tastes better. And instead of accessing it from their PCs, people are using their cellphones.

The Facebook site is optimised for viewing from a cellphone, which makes it easy to use. And when people update their status from their phone, it tells the friends that you are posting from a phone. It is creating huge interest on the possibilities of mobile websites.

Because if you can access Facebook from your cell, what else can you do? And there is so much more you can do with mobile websites.

Mobile websites can be used to provide anything from information, to forms to input information, giving consumers the ability to initiate purchasing decisions and will soon be extended to services like tracking packages, account balances and e-commerce.

Websites customised for handsets therefore give people the opportunity to have services they want at the touch of a button at anytime. And that means if you have a consumer facing business, you'd better take mobile websites seriously.