Facebook is on a roll these days. It is today releasing a major upgrade over it’s previous versions of user interface on mobile. Facebook launches one interface mobile website and this website would be suitable for all phones on the world.
As of now, there are mainly two mobile websites for social networking – touch.facebook.com and m.facebook.com. touch.facebook.com is designed and suited for smartphones and high end phones with touchscreen, whereas, m.facebook.com is designed and suited for feature phones with a touch interface.
From today, 1st April, 2011, Facebook will be collaborating and unifying all of it’s mobile presence on m.facebook.com. The reason behind doing such a thing was to resolve issues arising from multiple code bases. It had to maintain multiple mobile websites and because of this, there was lack of ability to innovate. This also forced the company to everytime build new features for multiple code bases.
Facebook’s Lee Byron said – “There will no longer be a difference between m.facebook.com and touch.facebook.com” He further added “We’ll automatically serve you the best version of the site for your device.”
Facebook announced that almost half of it’s user base which comes around to 250 million people use Facebook on mobile in a month. This is huge for any website that around half of its user actively use the website through their phone.
The new Website from facebook uses technologies such as XHP – which is a PHP extension that incorporates XML . It also uses Javelin and WURFL – an open source mobile device database.
Facebook’s mobile chief, Erick Tseng said that, this change will bring in more consistent user experience of the website throughout the world and will also enable Facebook to implement new and happening features easily and without any errors as now all mobile website would bear the same code.
The new framework is very smart and would automatically adjust depending upon the type of phone used by the user. It would automatically know when to deliver a touchscreen experience and not to deliver a touchscreen experience.
In our opinion, it’s definitely one of the smart moves by Facebook to further enhance user experience and capturing the world over with it’s brilliance.