Facebook CTO Brett Taylor told his Mobile World Congress audience that the company would work more closely with mobile operators and manufacturers to improve the mobile experience on Facebook and the web. Facebook’s intention to contribute to web browser development, and on carrier billing, could create increased revenue opportunities for mobile operators, analysts said.
Facebook said it is working with operators around the world to minimise the number of steps needed to complete a transaction in mobile web apps, which will make it easier for hundreds of millions of people worldwide to purchase apps on their device via operator billing. This will be automatically enabled where carriers support it when developers integrate the Pay Dialog into their app. The new billing system takes three steps to complete a transaction compared to the old one that required eight steps, including an SMS confirmation, Taylor said.
The operators working on the streamlined billing capability are AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, T-Mobile USA, Verizon, Vodafone, KDDI and SOFTBANK.
The company also said that it would join the W3C Mobile Web Platform Core Community Group, a group that includes several major operators, to make it easier for its developers to understand their app’s potential reach and to help prioritise which browser capabilities are important to them.
Paul Lambert, Senior Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, said that the move places Facebook at the heart of the mobile community, with the Internet giant acting as a champion for a mobile internet that works better for mobile operators and their customers, and one that operators can monetise more effectively than they do at present.
“A key challenge for Facebook will be whether it can work successfully enough with the many different companies in the mobile industry who often have competing technology and business strategies to achieve its ambitious goals,” he added.
Lambert said that one attraction for operators of simplified billing would be that they could help developers create applications that can work across numerous devices that they can bill customers directly for, thereby taking a cut of the price paid for the application or service.
“On an important level, Facebook’s announcements today are as much about the balance of power between the mobile and Internet companies as they are about how Facebook can help the mobile industry solve the problem of application stores generating lots of traffic, but little in direct incremental revenue. As such, mobile operators will hope that working with Facebook could help mobile operators create a new eco-system that over time dilutes some of the power held within the industry by the current market-leaders in the application store space: Apple and Google,” Lambert said.