Facebook (FB) Stock: FB Falls Again as the Company Announces Faster iPhone App

Culture

Facebook (FB) stock fell 87 cents – 2.7% -- on Thursday to close at $31.36. This is down 17% from its mid-May IPO of $38 from which it fell sharply in the weeks following, only to stage a recovery over the last couple of weeks.

Such recovery was propelled, in part, by the company’s announcements about new advertising vehicles that could help it galvanize its growing online user base, as well as the positive announcement by leading advertisers such as Ford and Coca Cola which said Facebook’s social marketing tools have helped them with their businesses.

The announcements were followed by Wall Street giants’ eventual evaluations which came on a mixed bag with some of the underwriters qualifying the controversial social network’s stock as “a buy” with promising potential, and others who were lukewarm at best warning about the challenges that still await the young tech company regarding its mobile revenue model.

And following that advise, Facebook has announced it is optimizing its iPhone and iPad applications in order to make them faster and improve the iOS users’ experience. The new version, which reportedly would be launched as soon as next month, would allow users to  post status, upload photos and connect with their friends much faster. However, the new app won’t have any new features.    

Nonetheless, Facebook on Wednesday unveiled a new "Open Graph" feature to let users follow stories people post within Facebook applications. Users will be able to get these updates on their news feed without having to add a person as their friend or subscribe to their full feed.

"For example, a person can follow their favorite restaurant critic from within a food review app on Facebook," Yariv Sadan, software engineer at Facebook, wrote in a post on the Facebook Developer's blog. "Content a person publishes within your app will be displayed in the follower's News Feed even if they aren't Facebook friends."

Whether the new feature will further annoy users concerned about the social network’s increasingly cluttered space, it remains to be seen. In the meantime, there are other pressing matters for Facebook which still has to deal with dozens of shareholder lawsuits, who allege analysts at large underwriting firms cut their financial forecasts for Facebook just before the IPO.