Facebook recently announced that their iPhone/iPod app now has 1 million users. Nice number, one that impresses considering that the app was launched at the same time the new Apple App Store opened its doors to business.

Where came the numbers? From Techcrunch’s Mobile Web Wars Roundtable, Jason Kincaid sharing the news dropped by Jed Stremel, Director of Mobile at Facebook. The app is sitting pretty in the top 10 of free application downloads from said store, placing 6th. In the beginning, Apple was displaying download numbers but backtracked on that one so we’ll just have to take Faceboo’k’s word on this one. Facebook earlier announced at its f8 conference that the app will soon go open source which will certainly result in plenty of competing iPhone apps.

Facebooking on your iPhone within easy reach – right, that’s just what the world needs. Do we need a dedicated Facebook app when the mobile version of the site works just as well? But then perhaps this is a clue just how much Facebook’s insinuated itself into mobile culture to the point where a Facebook app seems to make good sense.

What would be good to see is Facebook apps for all mobile platforms – Symbian, Linux, Windows Mobile even. For the latter, I’m pretty sure that WM users would appreciate a free bone thrown their way once in awhile considering the smaller pool of freeware apps for the platform.

One mystery remains – is Facebook making any money? Really? Will we get more concrete financial figures besides nice numbers of people getting their Facebook fix on their shiny iPhones? We’ll just have to see about that but let’s hope that the mobile app isn’t quite as cursory as the TypePad app for the iPhone or Symbian platforms. And with the limited storage on the new iPhones, perhaps sticking to m.typepad.com might be a better idea.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 10:30 am under iPhone.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
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