A new report from ABI Research calculates that the number of people accessing social networks from mobile phones will exceed 550 million this year. By the end of 2016 the figure will treble to over 1.7 billion users worldwide, which means over two-thirds of all social network users will be using mobiles to access the services.
Aapo Markkanen, senior analyst at ABI Research, said “A huge problem for Facebook is that while on the web it is a platform, on mobile it’s just another application. To strengthen its hand in the short term we expect Facebook to aggressively take advantage of HTML5, but in the longer term it should absolutely become a mobile operating system of its own.”
The company says this symbiosis of social networks and mobile phones can also be seen in recent moves by Google, with Google+, and Apple’s integration of Twitter with iOS5.