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What's up? My name's Dave Fetterman. I'm the engineering manager for mobile at Facebook.
Building Facebook for your desktop computer is comparatively easy. We get to write this
thing once, and it's gonna run on your browser, whether it's IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome.
Whether you have a PC, Mac, or you're running Linux or something. The problem is the Mobile
one is not so easy. If you're accessing the mobile web from your phone, it could be a
little clamshell, it could be an iPhone, an Android, something in the middle or something
vastly different in another country. Mobile web is actually pretty difficult to write
for. So this is a problem actually faced not only by Facebook, but by many mobile sites
around the web. Your phone could have Javascript or not, it could play video or have no idea
what video is. It could be a big screen, a small screen, a touch screen, or use hot keys.
This is a big problem. The good news is that we have 500,000 different types of mobile
browsers accessing Facebook and if anybody is gonna help solve this problem, it's gonna
be Facebook. So what we said was, "Hey, let's have users using the mobile web show up and
help us determine what this user agent string actually maps to in terms of capabilities."
So users will say, "Hey, I can see a star." Or "The screen is this wide." Or I'm using
this kind of phone on this carrier. We're able to gather millions of samples of this
data that we're actually able to contribute back to the open community. There are many
proprietary systems that are trying to solve this problem for the different developers
of the mobile app. But one that is particularly awesome is WURFL, the Wireless Uniform Resource
File, which is actually taking crowd source data kind of like this, the input or people
who actually manufacture phones, and the data gathered by large sites to actually help solve
this problem. Mapping this crazy user agent string into what kinds of capabilities the
phone has. It makes us able to develop the ideal mobile experience for you. So in addition
to sourcing data for WURFL, and using WURFL as part of Facebook, we're proud to announce
our sponsorship, ongoing, of the WURFL project. If you wanna learn more just check out http://wurfl.sourceforge.net.