Although my Facebook account was down for 24 hours yesterday due to the Group Hack,  if my calculations are correct, in the next couple of days Facebook will announce the break-through of over 100M mobile users.  About a month ago in my discussions with Facebook staff,  I heard that they had over 65 M Mobile users and they they were expanding about 1M new users per day…… Therefore, I would imagine anyday now they will announce the 100M users and launch their mobile ad platform and the mobile open API.  Couldn’t be better timing then right around Thanks-giving  and the end of the year Christmas sales.  Great time for advertising.

Last year on Dec 12, at 3:27  they announced the 100M users on Facebook.  It is incredible that in less then 1 year ( if they do hit the mark and announce it) they could repeat this with Mobile.  This is an exciting time as it is the first service that has broke through the 100M user mark in Mobile outside of China.

In the unofficial web blog from Apple, it looks like compatibility spagettii is about to happen, or not? Being in mobile myself for the last 15 years one of the greatest challenges with application development has always been with forward and backward compatibility. After Apple has now reached it’s 1billionth download with >30K apps in store and in the market for just over 1 year, compatibility-hell (CH) has started. As Apple is no stranger to this, I am sure they will do a great job in informing developers what to do about this, but what makes this interesting now is the cost to develop apps. As it will now become the responsibility for the developer to make sure that there is compatibility with the new OS3.0, New OS3.0 developers will now have to start looking at their apps for older versions potentially as well. As it is not cheap to develop apps, this is another factor that has made application development for dedicated platforms quite interesting. When there are standards around cross-platform application development, the same CH exists, but there is a bit more assurance on being able to have a product that works across multiple devices in the market.  As a developer, hopefully companies like Nitobi with PhoneGap will work out these issues and make it easier and cheaper to develop with CH.  I am particularly interested in how this will play out with the emerging App Stories of WinMo, Nokia’s Symbian, and Google Android.  Maybe it is time to just focus on the web?