Facebook has moved to squash rumors that it is building its own handset platform. The idea was pushed in the tech blog TechCrunch in the US, which says it had it confirmed by sources inside the company. It said the project has been going on for about a year and came about due to Facebook worries over the amount of market power exerted mostly by Google and Android phones, but also by Apple and its iPhone. The worry is that Facebook could be marginalized by either one, and other social networks promoted above it.
However Facebook immediately released a statement saying that this was not the case. “Facebook is not building a phone,” a company spokesperson told The New York Times and added that its approach has always been to make phones and apps more social. It lists current projects as everything from an HTML5 version of the site to apps on major platforms to full connect support with SDKs to deeper integrations with some manufacturers.
Facebook says that its view is that all experiences are better when social, so integrating deeply into existing platforms and operating systems is a good way to enable this… and it added that every time it works on a deep integration, people want to call it a ‘Facebook Phone’ because that’s such an attractive soundbite, but building phones is just not what we do.”
But you can understand some level of concern at Facebook. Recently Apple launched Ping, described as a social network for music lovers, and claimed that 1 million users signed up in just 48 hours.
We might expect Facebook to look for more and more control over the look and feel of Facebook on a phone and to deeply integrate Facebook into the contacts list of some phones.
The last thing that the world needs right now is another handset operating system, and it seems that Facebook gets this, instead opting to work as deeply as possible with phone suppliers. Facebook would certainly get a lot of support from OSs like LiMo or WebOS and even Nokia OSs such as MeeGo and Symbian, for deep integration which gave them any kind of edge.
TechCrunch named two high level Facebook employees, Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos as being in charge of the project, both of whom have worked on device operating software in the past, with Hewitt working on Firefox and an operating systems called Parakey which was acquired by Facebook in 2007. It sounds like a remarkably similar piece of software to the Palm/HP WebOS. Hewitt has also been in charge of most of the iPhone Facebook Apps, so knows a thing or two about Facebook on a phone. Papakipos was working on the Google Chrome OS project until June and is said to have been lured away purely to run this project. It is likely that they are both key men in Facebook’s integration strategy and are not building a phone.
Other social networks have launched their own phones, Microsoft’s Kin was about social networking and it died very rapidly and Helio created a phone that emerged in a MySpace version. Neither of these are hugely successful.
Facebook of course is very different from these other social networks, in that it has a thriving development community adding features and functions to Facebook all the time, and they might easily create the basis of a purely Facebook App Store.