The search engine launched this week by Facebook has been received with much enthusiasm. But the social network has been criticized for not investing more in advertising and applications for smartphones, given the large number of users of mobile platforms. More and more people are checking their Facebook accounts on mobile phones, during a travel or just on the way to work. Under these conditions, revenue from advertising on the site designed for computers is declining.
The company founded by Mark Zuckerberg is not ready to make the transition to mobile phones, where there is a lot of money to make, says Forbes. “It will take years and years to map the whole index of the graph,” said Mark Zuckerberg, at the launch of the search engine Graph Search.
Graph Search could be a huge source of revenue for Facebook if and when it will run on mobile platforms. “Relevant ads are a gold mine for mobile strategies, especially because their number is considerably lower on the phones than on the computers. Graph Search shows preferences of users, which is key in advertising relevance”, says Victor Basta, managing director at Magister Advisors. “Facebook must implement soon this mobile search engine,” added Basta.
According to the chief of StackMob platform, many companies avoid this market due to high costs. “They almost consider the development of this technology on phones a product itself, and not as a development of the main product,” he says.
Critics say that Zuckerberg and his team had a similar mentality in the past, when the use of HTML5 platform for mobile has made Facebook applications run very slowly. Zuckerberg admitted his mistake and summoned a team of engineers to create their own platform for iOS and Android operating systems.
Another problem facing Facebook is the declining of the number of users, which is visible in the United States and Britain markets. Some of them have switched to using the application on mobile phones, but it still needs considerable improvement to live up to the expectations.
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