Facebook, Meet Apple; Apple, Meet Facebook

Thursday, August 23, 2012 at 11am
By John Friedman

I’m an old dog when it comes to Facebook. I, along with a lot of 50-somethings, used it quite a bit a few years ago, mostly to connect with people from our highschool days back in the ’70s. It was great for catching up with long-lost old friends. That lasted about half a year.

After that novelty wore off, though — after lost connections had been remade (and some once remade were unmade again) — the thrill was gone.

*  *  *

The big roll-out in the tech news world today is FB’s release of its new app for iOS5, the operating system at the heart of Apple’s mobile products. This app is native, by which I take them to mean that the app sits on top of iOS5, rather than sitting inside of Safari sitting on top of iOS5.

On the Twitter machine people are commenting that the new app is snappy and well done, but that might be insiders’ hype (others say, I’ll believe it when I see it).

Whatever the case, the stock has not moved much. As I write this, the NAZ is down about 0.8% and AAPL shares are up about 0.5%, so figure about a 1.5% bump-up. In the grand scheme of FB price movements the last three months, that is not moving much.

[Aside: if you want to see something that *is* moving much, look at what happened to Todd Akins’s polling results in today’s Rasmussen, which shows a 13% swing to the bad for him in a few weeks’ time (Rasmussen has twitchy numbs, so this might exaggerate the reality a quite a bit).]

Given that the conventional wisdom is that FB’s most significant problem is its weakness in generating revenues from mobile platforms, and given that iOS is one of two dominants mobile platforms, you’d have to characterize the stock market’s response to today’s product roll-out — when a lot of people are feeling the new software for the first time, and when the rumor has now become a reality that, so far, sounds to be a good reality for users — as a yawn.

And then there’s that old stock market adage that says you should buy on the rumor, sell on the news. 

333 words

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