Facebook's Plans for the Mobile Web

(Source: market.android.com)

It has been a diversely successful year for Facebook with the website rolling out its billion dollar IPO as well as welcoming Angry Birds onto their platform. The social media site is not slowing down, and is planning to remain a force in the long term with its recent moves.

Teaming up with Firefox and a coalition of other companies, Facebook has created the Core Mobile Web Platform (coremob) community. The aim of the group is to provide opportunities to collaborate, work on and implement the next generation of mobile web standards.

According to Facebook, the number of users visiting and accessing their services from mobile devices such as smartophones and tablets is now greater than traffic from desktop users. With that in mind, it is in Facebook's own interest to develop and mold the future standards of mobile web to ensure an easy way for app developers to continue making products for their platform.

It looks like Facebook has thrown in a considerable portion of its lot in with mobile web. There is news that Facebook is testing new mobile features for Android which integrate SMS functionality. If you read the Permission page for the Facebook Android app (we know you didn't!), you would see that it already has permission to access the SMS features on your smartphone.

Android is the only platform that allows enough access to core functions of the device - something which Facebook is leveraging on for them to incorporate SMS into the device's feature set. How Facebook plans to implement SMS into social media interactions is not clear, but we are sure they have something up their sleeves.

Source: Facebook, Facebook: Developers via Arstechnica