Tag Archives: Evan Williams

Rating: Facebook could turn operators into digital drug mules

Ever since Evan Williams, Twitter’s CEO, gave a keynote speech at the Mobile World Congress 2011, we’ve always though that mobile network operators have an ambivalent attitude towards ‘disruptive’ technologies. Surely ‘tweets’ displace SMS traffic? Now Facebook is coming increasingly under the spotlight. According to its pre-IPO filing, Facebook now has more than 400 million users accessing the service on mobile devices, which is up from 70 million three years ago. These figures confirm that Facebook is now the dominant social networking ecosystem on the move as well as on the desktop. But what are the network operators getting out of this? Facebook’s ‘over-the-top’ (OTT) business model is creating significant strategic and revenue risks for mobile operators, according to Magister Advisors. Yet research carried out by Socialbakers shows that brands like Vodafone are benefitting significantly from interaction with users on Facebook. Continue reading →