Facebook Acquires Snaptu, Scraps Twitter, Other Apps?
Earlier this year, on the 20th of March to be precise, Techcrunch confirmed Facebook’s acquistion of popular feature phone app, Snaptu. For the uninitiated, Snaptu is a free mobile application platform that runs on virtually every type of internet-enabled mobile phone and affords the user access to popular services and applications, varying from social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to apps like Flickr, Picasa, news, blogs, sports, apps, productivity tools and local guides. With it’s beautifully crafted iPhone styled user interface and experience, Snaptu is capable of transforming even the dumbest phones into information and productivity powerhouses.
The rationale behind the acquisition is obvious, Facebook is looking to take advantage Snaptu’s mass adoption by the huge feature phone user demographic, as of January 2011, Snaptu application has over 27 million users worldwide. This sale didn’t have any noticeable consequences for us users at the time. Early this month however, Facebook released another app, Facebook For Every Phone, a development which by itself is insignificant until you try to visit m.snaptu.com and see these screens:
As it happened I stumbled upon this entirely by chance and was somewhat surprised to learn that Snaptu had been abruptly substituted in this manner, but I proceeded to download the new Facebook app out of curiosity. Sure enough, Snaptu is truly gone and has been replaced by what appears to be an exclusive Facebook app…no wait, at the bottom right corner of the new homescreen there’s an icon I’ve never seen before:
The icon, labelled ‘apps’ takes you to the familiar Snaptu home screen where Facebook is now hiding the rest of the suite of applets that used to come with Snaptu. Upon first contact the screen is bare, save for the ‘Manage My Apps’ icon. Clicking that takes you to what used to be the Snappstore. To my chagrin, Twitter is conspicuously missing from the list of available applets. And LinkedIn, like most of the others, is not an actual app, but a weblink with a generic graphic denoting it. The only fully featured applets apart from the Facebook super App (yeah, that’s what it looks like) are the News, Movies, Weather, and London tube Apps. Way to go Facebook.
old snaptu homescreen complete with google search bar
The new Facebook apps screen...this is Sparta
As you can see, compared to the home screen of the now erstwhile snaptu app, the applications screen of the new facebook app is pathetically sparse.
The find friends feature is however one of the new Facebook Apps’ most significant features, one which I think is key to Facebook’s long term mobile strategy. The feature encourages you to add or invite friends via access to your phone’s contacts, effectively giving Facebook potential access to virtually EVERY individual on the planet that possesses an internet enabled phone. On my phone, Facebook found 70 of my contacts who were already my friends (a fact I wasn’t aware of until then), and then offered to invite the remaining 208 that weren’t. Not only that, Facebook would then store the imported data and may use them to generate friend suggestions for me and others. I will be exploring this train of thought in another post on the implications of the launch of Facebook for all phones on the mobile social apps ecosystem.
If you already use Snaptu, you’ll find it still coexists with the new Facebook app and still does all you need it to do. But if for some reason you happen to uninstall it, sorry, you won’t be able to re-download. And while the service still works for now, it’s only a matter of time before they finally pull the plug. I personally find this to be a bit annoying because most of my mobile life currently revolves around Snaptu’s really useful apps, especially Twitter. I play the occassional game of sudoku, monitor my contacts on linked in, and track countless rss feeds. Now it’s beginning to look like I might have to begin searching for alternatives. To their credit, the new Facebook app still allows you import your feeds from Google reader into the News app, but now that it’s Facebook property who knows how long that functionality will last, there’s no love lost between both companies. Twitter on the other hand probably could care less, it looks like they’ve recently modified their API, effectively barring most third party apps from accessing DMs (direct messages), and accessing the service via Snaptu was already becoming a chore.
UPDATE For Nokia phone users, Snaptu is still available via the Nokia OviStore for the time being, get it while you can.
For those of you who didn’t already use Snaptu most of the above rant don’t concern you much, but you can check out what the Facebook For All Phones actually looks and feels like in the video below. You can also click here to get it. Never mind that it is substantially the same app that us Snaptu users have had for months now, only that it’s now a stripped down version of it 
If you look closely you can even see that the demo was done before Snaptu took their logo out the app. There you go.
You might also like::
Pingback: RIP Snaptu | TechLoy
Pingback: Finally, Snaptu Drops Support For Twitter, LinkedIn | TechLoy