Facebook’s mobile efforts have often courted controversy, and now it is in the spotlight again, having signed a deal with Samsung which will see the Korean giant not only pre-install Facebook’s apps on its smartphones, but make it impossible for users to remove them. Facebook has had a string of attempts, over the past seven years or so, to push its services to the heart of the mobile experience. These have ranged from designing its own handset, to striking deals with operators or device makers to pre-install the social networking and messaging apps and make them the defaults; or to offer a customized user interface with Facebook at the center. Although mobile usage of Facebook’s services has been its main…