More People Are Using Facebook via Phone For the First Time Ever

It’s time for another quarterly earning, that kooky game wherein companies announce how much cash they’ve raked in, and then investors spank or hail them without much correlation to reality. Now up: Facebook, which has just entered crazy new territory.

For the first time, more people are hitting the site via mobile web or app than are heading to Facebook.com on a real computer. In fact, over 150 million people around the world access Facebook solely through a phone. That’s nuts. FB is a small screen experience, not the network you first toyed iwth in your dorm room. Financially, good and bad news. They beat expectations! Revenue hit $1.59 billion, which is better than what everyone expected. And yet, the stock is tanking, because Wall Street is mentally ill. More people are using The Book than ever before (1.06 billion), more of them are using it on a phone than ever before (680 million every day, up 57% from last year), and yet $FB has dropped 10% in after-hours trading. The Zuck cannot win.

How Facebook Can and Will Kill the Traditional Telephone

As the founder of a startup, I am probably the last person you’d expect to tell you that scale matters. And to be sure, there’s plenty of innovation coming from small, nimble companies that nonetheless are able to disrupt huge markets. However, with Facebook’s recent addition of voice calling to its Messenger app, the company is poised to demonstrate to the mobile industry the benefits – and power – of scale, first hand. And in what can only be described as the perfect murder, Facebook is now in a position to effectively kill the traditional telephone, starting with the phone number. The implementation of Facebook’s voice features are straightforward yet unique: You make a call by tapping a name, not a number, a username, or any other type of identifier. You’re calling a social connection. That in itself is not shocking, but Facebook can go even further.

Read the full story at Giga OM.