This Facebook is for every phone

Facebook soon plans to announce the first results of the initiative,which it calls Facebook for Every Phone: More than 100 million people,now regularly access the social network from more than 3,000 models of feature phones,some costing as little as 20.

Many of those users,who rank among the worlds poorest people,pay little or nothing to download their Facebook news feeds,with the data usage subsidised by phone carriers and manufacturers. Facebook has only just begun to sell ads to these customers,so it isnt making money from them yet. But the countries in which the simple phone software is doing the bestIndia,Indonesia,Mexico,Brazil and Vietnamare among the fastest-growing markets for use of the Internet,according to research firm eMarketer.

Analysts say that Facebook has a powerful opportunity to win the long-term loyalty of millions of new global users by giving them their first taste of Internet through Facebook on a simple cellphone.

The feature phone project was driven by a small group of people who joined Facebook in 2011,when it purchased a startup called Snaptu. The team had to re-engineer Facebooks software to drastically shrink the amount of data sent over slow cellular networks. We actually run the apps on our servers, says Ran Makavy,who was CEO of Snaptu and now runs Facebooks feature phone project. The result was something that looks like a smartphone app.

Brian Blau,who studies consumer technologies at the research firm Gartner,says that given Facebooks mission of linking the entire globe through its service,it needed to reach out to the least tech-savvy customers.

They talk about socially connecting the world together, he says. They cant do that until they connect people who dont have smartphones or computers.