Brett Taylor, the chief technical officer of Facebook, in conversation with InsideFacebook’s Justin Smith at the ISA 2011 conference, stated that the company is focused on giving users a better social networking experience throughout 2011. For the whole of 2010, Facebook had been striving to come up with a plausible solution of spam and finally 95 percent of spam were cut off along with half of the companies policies and rules.
Taylor said that the company has spotted HTML5 as an effective technology for apps development and distribution. Since seven different versions of Facebook have been launched — Facebook.com, m.facebook.com, touch.facebook.com, iPhone app, Android app, Blackberry app, and a bunch from people who have built custom versions into their own OSs — it’s quite a challenge for the company to update all of them and Taylor said HTML5 will be of great help at this.
Taylor also said that they want to strengthen the mobile platform of the company. Probably it was internal survey that revealed people who connect to Facebook via mobile phones are more active than those who access the site from desktop and the number of such users is increasing rapidly. Taylor said, “125M using HTML5 with mobile Facebook already…We feel that this is really the direction we want to go.”
When asked if Facebook is receptive to become the platform for playing games both for hardcore gamers and casual ones. Taylor’s reply was affirmative. He said that developers have been given instructions to design games in such a way that both types find playing these games a nice experience. Taylor acknowledged that most users don’t log in the site for playing games. “Even though you might not be a hardcore gamer, you might like to play a lot,” said Taylor.
Audiences in the conference asked Taylor as to whether Facebook is open to interaction with Microsoft. Taylor’s reply was again positive.