Facebook Launches Zero, A Text-Only Mobile Site For Carriers
At the Mobile World Congress 2010, Facebook's Chamath Palihapitiya just finished a 20-minute keynote, outlining the social networking juggernaut's mobile strategy. We'll have a video of the full presentation up soon.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's earlier push onto phones ran through SMS, where third-party apps found little actual use — a signal that text-messaging was too narrow a pipe for a service whose U.S. users, per Nielsen, were already spending seven-plus hours a month on site by January 2010. Zero, unveiled by Chamath Palihapitiya in a 20-minute Mobile World Congress keynote, is the pivot from that failed model: a text-only mobile site built for carriers to distribute, stripping out images so basic handsets and thin data plans can handle it.
First-order effects
- Carriers gain a near-zero-data-cost way to put Facebook on feature phones without subsidizing smartphones, making the social network an easy default add-on for prepaid and emerging-market subscribers.
- Facebook converts its scale problem into a distribution asset: with Compete crediting it for 13 percent of U.S. traffic sent to major portals including Yahoo, MSN and AOL, Zero gives carriers a reason to preinstall or promote it.
Second-order effects
- Rival networks now face pressure to cut equivalent lightweight, carrier-friendly versions of their services or concede the next wave of mobile-first users to Facebook at the point of handset setup.
- Portals that rely on being users' starting page see their referral funnel extend further downmarket, as Facebook becomes the entry layer even on phones too basic for a full web session.
Third-order effects
- If the Zero model holds, carrier partnerships rather than app-store presence become the decisive battleground for reaching low-bandwidth markets — positioning whoever owns the social graph as the de facto on-ramp to the mobile internet.
The trend: Social networking is shifting from a destination website to a carrier-distributed default service, with stripped-down clients like Zero deciding who owns the mobile on-ramp.