Facebook Mobile Boosts Revenue and Adds Features to its App

With big revenues and new additions to its mobile app, Facebook Inc. is definitely trying to prove that it's doing social mobile services the right way.

Today, the biggest social network on the planet posted $1.33 billion dollars in ad revenue, a 41 percent jump from last year. Mobile ads from the relatively new Facebook project (compared to the website) made up a more-than-healthy 23 percent of the total.

As Mark Zuckerberg said on a conference call regarding the posted results of last year's fourth-quarter earnings, "Today there is no argument Facebook is a mobile company," reports the Wall Street Journal.

Yesterday we found out that Facebook's mobile app for iOS was adding some new features. The new Facebook, version 5.4, has added the voice messaging feature which they introduced to Android phones days earlier. The updated app also allows iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and iPad mini users to share video messages. Finally there's a Nearby button, which allows Facebook to use location services on the mobile Apple device to find interesting events, venues, restaurants, and other places nearby.

Still, with the impressive improvements in both the business and consumer ends of Facebook, Inc., some analysts are underwhelmed by Facebook's mobile subsection. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of those analysts, Richard Greenfield of BTIG Research, says that growth is not enough. "Despite the fact that they significantly increased the ad load in the mobile news feed, the growth rate seemed to slow," said Greenfield, noting the small increase between the third and fourth quarter profits.

Earlier this month, Facebook announced Graph Search, which has been described as a revolutionary social search engine which will allow people to find anyone based on the content users submit in their profile. Graph Search isn't available on mobile yet, as it is still being rolled out slowly and only available to a fraction of the Facebook empire right now.