Facebook shifting away from apps to mobile platform strategy

July 14, 2010 — 8:09am ET | By Jason Ankeny

Facebook plans to migrate away from standalone mobile applications in favor of embracing a platform strategy enabling developers to leverage its position at the top of the social networking food chain. "Where we're going from here is a platform strategy. We're going away from a one-off app strategy," said Facebook head of mobile products Erick Tseng during an appearance Tuesday at the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco. "We want to provide mobile developers with all the goodness of the open graph."

Facebook's conventional web platform supports more than 550,000 third-party applications and a million developer partners. Tseng pointed to location-based features as one segment where mobile developers could bolster the overall Facebook user experience: "If you can actually layer on top of (location) some kind of social intelligence--not just the fact that I'm near Starbucks, but the fact that 30 of my friends really like this frappuccino over the last couple months--I've got an interesting use case," he said.

Tseng reports that roughly 150 million users worldwide now access Facebook through their mobile devices. "Mobile is fast becoming our growth lever," he added. "As we begin to continue to expand, we're starting to go into geographies where phones are the predominant way you access the web. Mobile is a way we can get users to be aware of and engage with social services."

Facebook's existing smartphone application strategy has proven enormously successful with consumers. Thirty-nine percent of smartphone owners use the Facebook social networking app every 30 days, according to research firm The Nielsen Company--it is the most popular app on the iPhone (used by 58 percent of consumers) and BlackBerry (39 percent), and the second most popular on Android (51 percent).