At the Mobile World Congress on Monday, Facebook announced several new initiatives to battle fragmentation on the mobile web. The most intriguing may be a partnership with global wireless carriers -- including AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon in the U.S. -- to streamline mobile purchases for webapps using Facebook's login and payment platforms.
In this agreement, Facebook would be the intermediary between its web developer and wireless carrier partners. Customers purchasing goods through web apps equipped with Facebook's Pay Dialog wouldn't have to prepurchase Facebook credits; instead, they'd be billed by their wireless providers. Developers would deal with Facebook; Facebook would deal with the carriers -- with its Payments and Credits platform translating between the two on the transaction.
As a Facebook spokesperson told Wired, right now this program is "more vision than reality"; it hasn't been fully implemented, and many of the details still have to be worked out between all the partners in the coming months.
The vision, though, is spelled out in a blog post by Facebook Director of Developer Relations Doug Purdy: to "minimize the number of steps needed to complete a transaction in mobile web apps, which will make it easier for hundreds of millions of people worldwide to purchase apps on their device via operator billing." Besides the Big Three carriers in the U.S., announced partners include Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, Vodafone, KDDI, and Softbank Mobile.
The carrier payment partnerships also part of a broader effort by Facebook to make mobile app development easier (and make partnership with Facebook more appealing to developers):
- Facebook is extending its social app discovery feature to include native Android apps in addition to iOS and web apps;
- It's joining the W3C's Mobile Web Platform Core Community Group, "to help accelerate the improvement and standardization of mobile browsers";
- It's immediately contributing a cross-platform mobile web test suite called Ringmark.
The payments initiative, however, is the most ambitious and has the most potential to turn into a serious revenue stream for Facebook and its partners.
"We think this experience can be as good or even better than the native platforms," Facebook CTO Bret Taylor told Computerworld. "By having a great developer experience around billing we'll be unlocking the business potential of the mobile Web."
As I wrote earlier this month, payments and mobile are the two areas where the company has been the slowest to leverage its platform. A real excursion into mobile payments is the best way for Facebook to continue to grow -- going where its users already are, and making use of that portable buying machine in their pockets. But just how far is Facebook willing to go?
Not very far. At least not yet.
According to a Facebook spokesperson, the immediate use case is very close to what Facebook is already doing with Credits, i.e., payments for virtual goods in casual games by Zynga and other developers using Facebook's platform. The only real difference is that customers would be billed in cash through mobile carriers directly on mobile phones.
Given the untapped possibilities of mobile payments, shopping and commerce, this may be the narrowest implementation possible. What about a Facebook web app that lets you get together with friends, order takeout and go pick it up, without ever pulling out a credit card? Or that alerts you to local deals and coupons? Or buys digital media with Facebook credits? What about extending this to native smartphone apps on iOS, Android, etc., that use Facebook logins and payments through the Open Graph? None of these are yet visible on the radar, according to the spokesperson who briefed me.
This baffled me, so I reached out to another Facebook spokesperson to ask specifically about the prospect of a broader mobile payment platform beyond virtual goods. This was the (coy? vague? willfully neutral?) response:
In short, Facebook is developing a mobile payments system that, while limited, could blossom into a powerful, cross-device, inherently social mobile shopping platform, giving it access to real-world revenue and shopping data that would make Google blush. Then cringe. Then probably get really mad.
All they have to do is line up the infrastructure with developers and carriers, use social games and virtual goods as a real-world proof-of-concept, build out its relationship with merchants -- note: not an easy task -- and then take the lid off the thing.
Then it's all over. Except, you know, beating Google and Square and PayPal and the banks and credit card companies and everybody else. No big deal -- at least for a company that's really serious about changing the world.
