Friday, July 01, 2011

Facebook's Next Major Breakthrough

SAN FRANCISCO - NOVEMBER 15:  Facebook founder...Image by Getty Images via @daylife(Article first published as Facebook's Next Major Breakthrough on Technorati.)

Facebook's next major breakthrough is not going to be some nifty new feature, or yet another higher valuation, but its push for HTML5. It is going to be a major breakthrough for the industry at large when Facebook is not a native app on your smartphone or tablet but rather still a browser experience. That would be Mark Zuckerberg going toe to toe with his icon Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs felt snubbed by Mark when Mark did not play along with some kind of a "social" idea Jobs had for his music offerings. Jobs retaliated by integrating Twitter into his very operating system. Snub to Facebook. Mark retaliated by thumbing HTML5 in Jobs' face.



If the action on all screen sizes is at the browser level, as it should be, Apple's many "advantages"/lock-ins will evaporate, as they should. Native apps are a throwback to a previous era.
GigaOm: Facebook brewing something “awesome” in Seattle: the company is also understood to be building an HTML5-based platform to serve a mobile version of its site through the web, rather than through a native app interface.
Jobs is not anti HTML5. After all his whole fight with Adobe was that Flash was no HTML5. And HTML5 ruling all screen sizes might actually help take Apple products to the masses. Prices on Apple products might come down. You might need to approve apps for the App store. But there is no approval process for HTML5 supported, web based apps/sites. And that is a good thing. Approving and disapproving websites, is that not what they do in China?
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