14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, Facebook announced to great fanfare that it was teaming up with leading mobile phone and tech companies in the world for Internet.org, a new project focused on bringing the internet to the entire planet, by tackling all the issues currently preventing universal access.
The idea is great and Facebook is hardly the only one wanting to do this. Google for example has its Project Loon, which would provide cheap wireless access to rural areas, and other similarly focused projects. Facebook though has just unveiled a website and a lofty goal, but no actual means of achieving it.
But that's not to say Facebook is just doing it for show. One of the problems that prevent greater internet coverage is bandwidth. Apps and the web consume too much data, data that is expensive on a mobile network.
And Facebook isn't unaware of the fact that it's one of the biggest traffic generators out there. The company itself admits that its apps consume quite a lot of data.
"For example, at the beginning of this year, our Facebook for Android app used about 12MB per day on average. This is a lot, but it’s not completely unreasonable given the number of photos in the typical experience," it explained in its Internet.org technical document.
"By simply focusing on improving data usage, we expect to be able to reduce this to about 1MB per day," it boasted.
"If we offer a special variant with fewer photos in developed countries, we will be able to reduce it even further. But even without that, we expect to be able to reduce our data usage by more than 10x through this effort alone," it said.
This should make it even clearer why Facebook is very interested in Google's new image format WebP, which has as its main advantage size. WebP images are significantly smaller than JPEG or PNG images with similar quality settings.
