Updated at 13:07
FACEBOOK GAVE ITS clearest indication that the company’s future is in multiple apps after it announced another successful earnings report.
The company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company will be addressing the different ways people use the web to interact and share content by creating “standalone experiences.”
He said that that the company will be working on developing these products over the next few years.
In terms of the focus of building new and separate experiences… [we will] build a handful of great new experiences that are separate from what you think of as Facebook today.
Currently, Facebook has three main apps that are separate to the site, Instagram, Messenger and Pages Manager. Zuckerberg used Messenger as an example saying usage of it grew by 70 per cent - but didn’t reveal any usage figures behind it – and said that it was because it was “given room to breathe and blossom.”
Both Messenger and Pages Manager focus on a specific area of Facebook and it’s likely that future apps will follow this trend. Previous apps released by Facebook didn’t fare so well because they copied other apps like Camera (a clone of Instagram before it was purchased by Facebook) and Poke (a clone of Snapchat).
Other mobile projects such as Facebook Home, which replaces your Android phone with a specialised Facebook home page, didn’t fare well either.
Facebook has announced its first new app of the year, Paper, will be made released on 3rd February. The app, which presents the news feed as a scrollable news reader, is completely gesture-based and takes inspiration from similar apps like Flipboard.
The app will be made available to iPhone users in the US first before it’s rolled out to other territories.
(Video: Facebook/Vimeo)
The company recorded further growth in profits after it generated $5.29 billion in revenue during the last three months of 2013, and reported a profit of $523 million in its earnings call last night.
It said that it saw 945 million monthly active users on mobile, with 296 million using only mobile to access the site. The number of daily active users across both desktop and mobile was 757 million on average with 1.23 billion using the site every month.
Originally published 9:57am
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