Not Mobile, but Still Different

Mark Zuckerberg, answering a question at Facebook’s mobile event on Wednesday about why his company still lacks an official iPad app:

iPad’s not mobile.

I think this needs to be read in context. Facebook is a web company, and on the desktop the site’s web interface works perfectly fine compared to native applications. On the iPhone, there’s no way the web interface would be readable, so native apps are used instead. On the iPad, since it can display the site the same way as on the desktop, in Facebook’s view it works just as well. The iPad is a mobile device, but not as far as the Web is concerned…

…if the only thing that matters is the display. The input methods are completely different, though, and Facebook’s site still relies on a lot of small click-targets and hover-triggered links which do not work well on the iPad. I think they overlooked that. Sure, you can use the full Facebook site without an app, but it’s an unpleasant experience. As “a really developer-heavy company,” Facebook seems to look at the site from the perspective of what it can accomplish technically, rather than how it’ll be used in reality. I suspect this is the source of their problems, and ignoring the iPad is another manifestation of their works-on-paper mentality.