Facebook after 1.3million new customers from India

Mark Zuckerberg founder of Facebook has rousing welcome at a meeting in New Delhi from technology students, during his visit to India, where social networking is growing at lighting speed with potential 500 million Facebook users.

Kicked out of China, where the internet is more closely monitoring than the West, Facebook sees India offering access to millions of users. But the big problem for Zuckerberg is the speed of the internet connections, catering to data hungry. Facebook technicians launched an usual experiment called “2G Tuesdays” and are using simulated 2G mobile phone service to accelerate the speed up the apps, and demonstrate to his Silicon Valley technical geniuses to have experience of life time how the social networking app designed for superfast 4G connections, works on a painfully slow internet connection and to understand the frustrations and hardships of the users in emerging markets.

With user growth reaching to its peak performances in rich countries and shows signs of slowing, Facebook and other US tech giants such as Google and Twitter are lobbying to win new users in emerging markets such India and Indonesia.

Zucjerberg says “We really want to get the next billion new people online” and India is the prime target. With all this mind Facebook had already launched Facebook Lite and reconfigured its app to use only a tenth of bandwidth it needed a few years back.

India is the second largest market in user numbers and Facebook suggests that India will overtake US to become the largest market within 18 months. eMarketer predicts that it will cross 200m by 2017. Facebook earns all its revenue from advertising and had some success with the Indian companies.

Google has also launched its low-speed search service and offline functions for video site YouTube.