It's been thirty days since Facebook dropped its S-1 filing for an IPO. But that month hasn't been a stone-silent quiet period. Just this week, Facebookheld a huge marketing event in New York, introduced mobile ads, rolled out new brand pages, mobile payments and developer tools, and left no Wall Street bank behind in underwriting the IPO. That's a pretty full news feed for a company supposedly cramming for its final exams.
Nearly all of the Facebook news points this month speaks to a weakness identified in its S-1; before 2012, it hadn't spent nearly enough energy shoring up its mobile business. And the fact that Facebook has worked so hard to address that weakness is meant to signal to investors that the company still has plenty of iterative innovation left.
A month ago, I identified four points Facebook needed to address in mobile to move itself beyond "the desktop age" (which we're still smack in the middle of, by the way):
Numbers one and two: check and check. (Still plenty to be done in both mobile advertisement and mobile payments, but these are significant steps, especially considering just how many balls Facebook is juggling at once.)
Number three is actually even more pressing than it was a month now that Zynga has unveiled a Facebook-independent social gaming platform platform and mobile-friendly social shopping site Yelp has come roaring out of the gate after its own IPO. These are both businesses that could have belonged to Facebook, and where it could still be very competitive. Number four remains a stone mystery to anyone not on the inside of Facebook's plans (and probably even to them).
So quick and dirty grades for Facebook's efforts in mobile this month:
At its marketing conference on Wednesday, Facebook VP of Product Chris Cox recounted joining the company in 2005:
From those humble desktop-bound beginnings, Facebook built up a billion-dollar business. And it's continuing to build, to grow, to evolve. That's the message. Is anyone listening?
