Facebook may finally be bringing Graph Search to mobile devices soon. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg said as much on the company’s earnings call during the Q&A portion on Wednesday.
“Pretty soon, I think, you should expect us to roll out the mobile version of this,” he’s quoted as saying. “I think that that’s going to be an important step, because most of the usage of Facebook overall is on mobile, so we expect that that’s where engagement will really start to come from on Graph Search over time.”
In its earnings report, Facebook revealed that it has 556 million mobile daily active users (up 49% year-over-year) and 945 million mobile monthly active users (39% year-over-year). 53% of the $2.34 billion in advertising revenue it made during the last quarter came from mobile.
Graph Search, so far, has shown a lot of promise in concept, but has been rather underwhelming in execution mostly due to a combination of an extremely slow roll-out, and an even slower addition of various capabilities. For example, back in September, Facebook announced that Graph Search would start including status updates, photo captions, check-ins and comments.
Now, four months later, some of us still don’t have access to this functionality.
Even if Graph Search does hit mobile soon, there’s no telling how long it will take for it to become available to all of Facebook’s users. A lot of people haven’t even gotten the “new” News Feed the company revealed nearly a year ago.
Today, Facebook announced a new standalone app for news reading called Paper. This is part of a strategy the company is pursuing, offering various apps for different parts of the Facebook experience, pretty much following what they did with the launch of the Messenger app back in 2011. Perhaps a Facebook search app will be in the cards.
Graph Search on mobile presents a potentially significant revenue stream for Facebook through mobile search ads.
Images via Facebook