Wall Street, Mobile Developers Tank FB Stock

A negative cover story in Barron's this week tanked Facebook stock and now a new report on mobile developers saying that Facebook could easily lose its market share have caused the social network stock to tumble.

The stock, which fell from its initial public offering price of $38 in May  to less than half of that this month finally rose a little when chief executive Mark Zuckerberg publicly acknowledged the company made mistakes earlier this month. The share price rose from $17.68 to $21.86 in mid-September, a much-needed bump. However, following the Barron's story and the report by Appcelerator, shares fell 9.1 percent to $20.79, according to Forbes.

“Mobile developers believe that a mobile-first startup could disrupt Facebook,” Appcelerator and research firm IDC wrote in a report after polling 5,526 mobile developers, Forbes reported. “A resounding 66 percent of mobile developers state that it is ‘likely to very likely’ that a mobile-first social startup will disrupt the market for social applications on mobile devices and take market share from Facebook.”
 
Previously, Zuckerberg said the company’s problem was relying on HTML 5 instead of creating standalone Facebook applications for the iPhone iOS and Google’s Android. Wall Street has been fickle about the social network ever since its mobile shortcomings have been made apparent.
 
Could a startup destroy all that Facebook has created? It's unlikely it could and even more unlikely it could do so in only a few short years. Within that time, with Facebook poaching engineers and other savvy workers, it will likely come up with some solutions.
 
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