U2opia Launches Fonetwish Service For Facebook Access on Airtel in India

U2opia Mobile, a Singapore-based mobile solutions provider has launched Fonetwish, a platform for accessing Facebook via USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) in partnership with telecom provider Airtel. The service has been developed jointly with Facebook and it’s the first of its kind.
USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) is a menu-based system that allows interfacing with content based services. Unlike a normal browser, the USSD menu acts as browser to pull content to the phone, hence it does so without using the internet or activating GPRS capabilities.

Airtel’s 150 million Indian customers will be able to update their Facebook status for free, but to use other features like viewing, commenting, posting on friends walls, confirming friend requests, ‘Like’ news feeds, view notifications and finding and adding friends, they will have to pay a minimal charge of Re 1 per day.

The users will have to dial *325# (“*fbk#” for non-qwerty mobile handsets) from their handsets which will open a menu that will prompt the user to enter their Facebook username and password and after the one-time registration, a text menu is displayed for browsing through content.



“Although smartphones are available in India, the number of users are not very high. Fonetwish will allow everyone with a mobile phone to access Facebook on their mobiles,” said Sumesh Menon, Co-Founder and CEO, U2opia Mobile, speaking to Techcircle.in. “Currently the USSD based service is only available on Airtel but talks are ongoing with other telecom operators for similar services. We are also looking at expanding our services to other countries like Indonesia and Philippines.”