It’s become clear that smartphones are going to be increasingly ubiquitous for the foreseeable future. And a recent study indicates that many people are using those devices to access Facebook more than for anything else.
Facebook is now one of the top three providers of email messaging on mobile phones, according to a recent survey conducted by market research firm CCS Insights. In fact, the survey shows such growth for Facebook across all applications — from video viewing to social networking to mobile messaging — that CCS Insight predicts that Facebook could soon transcend offerings from industry giants such as Apple, Google and Microsoft.
“Facebook is fast becoming the default destination for all things mobile,” CCS Insight director Paolo Pescatore said in a press release accompanying the research report. “The mobile phone is now one of the most prolific consumer electronics devices on the planet.”
It turns out that even though the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social networking company does not yet have its own mobile operating system or hardware products, Facebook is already a major player in all things mobile in its native U.S. and abroad. CCS conducted its survey of mobile Internet usage in May 2011 with 7,000 respondents in France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, U.K., and the U.S. Based on the information CCS culled from Europe, Facebook is swiftly supplanting regional social networking sites among users many regions there, such as Tuenti in Spain.
And Facebook has no plans to slow down its growth on the mobile front. The company is said to be working on its own mobile browser platform, powered by the quickly growing markup language HTML5, so that the mobile experience of its social networking site can be uniform across all devices in the future. Will anyone be using their mobile phones for actual phone calls anymore? In the years ahead, the answer may be no.
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