iOS Blog: Facebook Abandoning HTML5 to Speed Up iOS App
Jun 27, 2012 11:01 am PDT by Jordan Golson
Facebook engineers are completely rewriting the social network iOS app to make it faster. The app, which has been criticized by many users for being extremely slow, was built using the HTML5 Web-based programming language.

It makes the app much easier for Facebook's engineers to port to other platforms like Android or Windows Mobile -- but it fails to take advantage of the iOS operating system.

As a result, the app -- which is used for everything from posting status updates to checking in to restaurants -- is much slower than comparable apps written to be a native app from the bottom up. Facebook knows this and is giving the app a complete rewrite in Objective-C, turning it into a true iPhone app and making it much faster. Nick Bilton, reporting for The New York Times:
I had the opportunity to see the yet-unreleased iPhone application and its fast. Blazing fast. The two developers I spoke with said the new application is currently being tested by Facebook developers and is expected to be updated this summer.

Don’t get too excited, though. The new Facebook app looks exactly like the old one. Facebook hasn’t changed the design, but rather focused on speed.

According to Bilton, the new and improved Facebook app should be released next month.

Facebook for iOS is available free from the App Store. [Direct Link]

Facebook has added another acquisition to its arsenal with social bookmarking firm Spool.

In a blog post, the Spool team said its technology makes it easier to consume content on a mobile device. "We firmly believe that solving these problems will be increasingly important as the world accesses the Internet primarily through mobile devices," the company said.

"The Spool team has deep expertise in mobile software development and a passion for making content easy to consume. We're excited for the team to join and accelerate their vision at Facebook," a Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement.

News of the Facebook purchase came shortly after Spool announced in a separate blog post that it would shut down "to pursue our vision in a new way."

Spool has since sent its users an email with their bookmarks attached. Those links can be downloaded to a computer or loaded directly in to a browser's bookmarks folders. The company suggested that those who want to use another bookmark synchronization service try Pocket or Delicious.

"We are extremely excited to accelerate our vision and help Facebook's users connect and share with the people in their lives," Spool concluded.

Spool launched in private beta in Sept. 2011 after debuting at TechCrunch Disrupt. "Spool is an easy way to save articles, image galleries, and videos to get back to later," the company said at the time. "Just click on the Spool add-on in your browser and the page you're on will show up on your phone."

By January, it had raised $1 million in funding from 15 investors.

Mobile will likely be a major focus at Facebook in the years ahead. In February IPO filings, Facebook said it had 425 million mobile users, but was not yet making any money from them. Shortly after, Facebook announced plans for ads in mobile newsfeeds. But in an amended S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook said it had 488 million mobile users in March but was still not generating any meaningful revenue from those interactions.

Last month there were reports that Facebook was working on location-based mobile advertising.

In recent months, Facebook has acquired Face.com, Piecable's mobile development team, and social discovery app Glancee. It also shelled out a rumored $1 billion for Instagram.

There are 1.7 billion shares of Facebook currently sitting on the sidelines. The biggest chunk of those shares, 1.2 billion of them, will be released from their lock-up provisions in 177 days. That’s in November and is a pretty standard lock-up period for an IPO. The first slab of 271 million insider and principal shareholders stock will be available for sale in 86 days, an unusually short lock-up period.

Shares of online video games purveyor Zynga (ZNGA) are down $1.97, or almost 39%, at $3.11 down $2.08, or 41%, at $3, after the company this afternoon reported Q2 revenue and earnings per share that missed consensus estimates, and cut its outlook for the year’s outlook for bookings and EPS, citing delays in some games and weakness in usage trends on Facebook (FB).

Revenue in the three months ended in June rose 19%, year over year, to $332 million, yielding EPS of a penny per share, excluding some costs.

Analysts had been modeling $342.8 million and 5 cents a share, according to FactSet.

For the full year, the company cut its EPS outlook to a range of 4 cents to 9 cents, down from a range of 23 cents to 29 cents offered back in April. Bookings are now expected in a range of $1.15 billion to $1.23 billion, down from the April forecast of $1.43 billion to $1.5 billion.

Zynga attributed the change in outlook to “delays in launching new games, a faster decline in existing web games due in part to a more challenging environment on the Facebook web platform, and reduced expectations for Draw Something.”

Profit of 12 cents per share on revenue of $1.18 billion. The consensus was 12 cents and $1.15 billion.

In April, Zynga conducted a "secondary stock offering" in which insiders dumped 43 million shares of stock at $12 a share, raking in about $516 million.

Yesterday, four months later, Zynga reported a horrible quarter, and the stock plunged to $3.

In other words, Zynga insiders cashed out at exactly the right time.

In fact, they cashed out in the same quarter in which Zynga imploded.