Facebook, the social networking giant that has more than 500 million users and counting, has flexed its financial muscle to the tune of $60 to $70 million by purchasing Israeli company Snaptu. For those who do not know what Snaptu is or what does it do, this startup churns out apps for cell phones. In addition, this isn’t Facebook’s first brush with Snaptu since the latter has been working with Facebook as well as other partners to roll out more efficient and smaller mobile applications of a company’s site. Apps developed by Snaptu are specially designed to work across a larger variety of lower-powered devices instead of the high powered smartphones that you see in the markets these days. Snaptu claims that their lower-end Facebook app which rolled out in January 2011 will play nice with 2,500 different mobile devices worldwide, which blankets all but 20% of all mobile devices sold. The app itself is free, but users will have to make sure they can pay the data connection. Looks like Facebook wants their app to proliferate just about any and every mobile device from henceforth.
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