Facebook unifies mobile web experience across all phones

With its active monthly mobile web userbase now topping the 250 million milestone, Facebook introduced a new mobile website promising to optimize the social networking experience regardless of device model. Facebook said it will upgrade the m.facebook.com site to offer the same features across both smartphones and feature phones: "Every device uses the same framework," explains product designer Lee Byron on the Facebook Engineering blog. "This way we can move even faster and build new features just once for every mobile device. It also means that everyone can access the same features, whether writing messages or checking into Places. There will no longer be a difference between m.facebook.com and touch.facebook.com, we'll automatically serve you the best version of the site for your device."

Byron notes that the new m.facebook.com leverages a UI framework based on XHP, Javelin and WURFL, a solution for presenting content on a variety of mobile devices. "On the latest WebKit based devices, like iPhone and Android, we use CSS3 and vendor-specific rules for display and animation as well as some of the new JavaScript APIs included in HTML5 for local caching and history management," Byron notes. "For other devices we can target specific issues. For example, some devices don't have keyboards, or have limited means of navigating a page, tiny screens, or crippling browser bugs. We can customize our site in each case to deal with these issues and provide the best possible experience to everyone. This mobile UI framework allows engineers to focus on building their product and not on supporting device edge cases." The m.facebook.com revamp will roll out over the next several weeks.

More than half of all Americans over the age of 12 are now on social networking platform Facebook, according to a new report conducted by Arbitron, Inc. and Edison Research. As of January 2011, 51 percent of Americans maintain Facebook profiles, up from just 8 percent only three years ago. In addition, Facebook is the most popular mobile application across most operating systems according to Nielsen Company data published in mid-September: Fifty percent of iOS users have accessed the app within the last 30 days, compared with 45 percent of BlackBerry users and 32 percent of Windows Phone users. In addition, Facebook is the second most popular app among Android users (45 percent)--only Google Maps ranks higher (46 percent).

For more:
- read this Facebook blog entry

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