CNET: If Facebook Dies (And It Might), Its Killer Will Be Born Mobile

This sounds like a massive opportunity for Twitter, which plays well with mobile and has a few possible revenue channels with it (read: more than Facebook). Maybe Mark Zuckerberg should ask Tom Anderson for tips.

Regardless of who got played in the deal (read: small investors, as usual), the market is actually responding appropriately to Facebook’s current situation: the site is be a behemoth of traffic and attention, a platform underlying the very fabric of the Web, and an indispensable part of the lives of millions, but that doesn’t meant it’s safe. Sure, Facebook has conquered the Web, but the Web as we know it may be a dying medium. The Facebook killer won’t be a Website at all: it’ll be born mobile, just like the generation who will use it.

Traffic from mobile devices is growing at an astounding rate — by some estimates, mobile visits now account for fully 20 percent of Web traffic. Every measure of mobile growth borders on exponential: Cisco estimates that global mobile data traffic will increase 18 times over between 2011 and 2016, the amount of mobile data consumed will go up 17-fold in the same time frame; mobile video will account for 70 percent of mobile traffic by 2016, 25 times more than in 2011. Global mobile data traffic more than doubled in 2011, for the fourth year in a row.

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