BlackBerry gets Facebooked
Canadian vendor Research In Motion (RIM), joined the social networking revolution this week, making Facebook available to BlackBerry users.
Mike Lazaridis, founder of RIM and Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, unveiled the application at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment show in San Francisco on Wednesday.
T-Mobile USA has been selected to be the first carrier to provide the software to its customers.
Facebook users can now wirelessly send and view messages, photos, pokes and Wall posts from their BlackBerries, with the platform automatically pushing notifications to the user’s phone.
“Facebook is one of the fastest growing web destinations among BlackBerry smartphone users and it has become an important element in the evolving fabric of personal communications,” said Lazaridis.
RIM also dropped in some research from the Yankee Group, which found that even at this nascent stage of the market, 19 per cent of adult consumers who access social networks on their PCs also regularly access these same sites on their mobile phones.
As if more evidence were needed that social networking is a hot topic at the moment, Facebook has just been valued at $15bn, after Microsoft paid out $240m for a 1.6 per cent stake in the company.
