At least something is moving in the right direction in this challenging economic environment... According to a post by Nick O'Neill appearing at AllFacebook.com, "the unofficial FaceBook Blog," Mark Zuckerberg told Davos attendees last week that Facebook has over 25 million people accessing the site via their mobile devices on a monthly basis. To put that into perspective, you may recall that last November, we had a story where an engineer on Facebook's mobile team stated usage numbers had grown from 5 million to 15 million. So if we are comparing apples to apples here - there was a 10 million user gain in 10 weeks (mid November to the end of January). That's pretty impressive!
But ARE we comparing apples to apples?
The AllFaceBook.com post also offered these numbers:
As of today, the company has over 4 million daily active users just between their top 3 mobile applications. According to our Facebook application statistics, Facebook for iPhone has approximately 1.64 million daily active users, Facebook for Blackberry has approximately 1.56 million daily active users, and the general mobile application has just under 1 million daily active users. This doesn't include all the users on Palm applications as well as general mobile users which are not technically required to add the mobile application to visit the site, which means there could easily be more than a million other daily mobile users.
Seems like the "active user" number is almost as squishy as the number of people who viewed the Super Bowl this year (ref: Nielsen Media Research now says the Steelers-Cardinals Super Bowl game was the most-watched in history. Nielsen said 98.7 million people were watching Pittsburgh's 27-23 victory Sunday night, 1.3 million more than watched the Giants' win over the Patriots last year. On Monday, Nielsen reported that this year's game had 95.4 million viewers).
You can bet that Facebook for Palm, a promoted feature of the Palm Centro, is playing a key role in someone's numbers, if not this 4 million amount.
