The fact that Facebook is something of a success and phenomenon won’t come as a surprise to anyone reading the Blog Herald, but the recent mobile growth just might. Apparently they launched some new mobile services, and that sparked this success blog post, with the following message:
People are hungry for interactive mobile features worldwide, and Facebook users are no exception. Usage of our mobile products has grown from 5 million to 15 million active users since the beginning of the year. We have expanded our mobile team and are continuing to make improvements every day.
That by itself is impressive, and the success can probably be put down to the ability to actually interact via your mobile phone, something that isn’t too common, as ReadWriteWeb points out in their story.
Blogs could see the same mobile growth, it’s just a matter of reaching out with content that fits the mobile phone. Sure, you can read traditional blog posts on smartphones, and perhaps even ye olde mobile phone, and if you have a mobile version of your site, via any of the providers or by yourself, it might even be pretty usable. That’s not the real issue here.
There is no doubt in my mind that we will wake up to smaller screens, and start setting up m.domain.com’s all over the place, so that people get used to put an m in front of an URL and get a more mobile version of any site. It’s already happening, problem is, it is happening silently. For blogs, who by itself is a pretty fast and direct medium, to really get ahead in the mobile game, we need to push the mobile sites harder, and make them matter.
In other words, we need to be able to communicate via the mobile sites as well, which includes commenting, and we need to put the material out there for anyone to read on the go.
That’s all technical stuff that we can easily overcome. The hard part is to get your readers to visit your site via their mobile phone as well. So we need to push that too, just like we do with the mammoth RSS feed icons, which really is way more off target than a mobile version of the site to quite a lot of today’s blog readers. They got their mobile phone and know how to use it, but RSS is just some weird techy thing.
Maybe the success of Facebook, along with Twitter and similar, will speed up the mobile web a bit.
Do you read blogs or visit social networks on your mobile?
