Facephone
Earlier this week we commented on the interchange between tech business blog Tech Crunch - which had written a story claiming Facebook is building its own mobile phone.
Upon realising his PR people had antagonised this influential publication, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the sensible measure of inviting Tech Crunch over to FB towers to clarify the matter. The raw transcript of the interview is here, but we've extracted what we consider to be the key excerpts.
Zuck's main agenda appeared to be to clarify the semantics around what is meant by "building a phone". Of course a lot of vendors don't physically build their products, finding it more efficient to get companies like Hon Hai to do it instead. So on that basis, of course Facebook isn't building its own phone.
But the main issue here is one of competition. If Facebook is looking to do an Apple and control every aspect of a future handset in order to optimise it for Facebook - a bit like Google did with the Nexus One - then it's moving into direct competition with all those OEMs and operators that constantly bang on about how great their new phones are for social networking.
"Our whole strategy is not to build any specific device or integration or anything like that," said Zuck. "Because we're not trying to compete with Apple or the Droid or any other hardware manufacturer for that matter.
"Our strategy is very horizontal. We're trying to build a social layer for everything. Basically we're trying to make it so that every app everywhere can be social whether it's on the web, or mobile, or other devices."
What Zuck is essentially saying is that he wants every phone to be a Facebook phone, which is consistent with his strategy for the web. But seeing as that would require the cooperation of the rest of the stakeholders in that phone, we can safely assume there will be varying degrees of Facebook integration. Zuck stressed that he's not looking to build a ground-up OS, but he also said you have to design social from the ground up.
"We can do a single sign-on if we do a good integration with a phone, rather than just doing something where you go to an app and it's automatically social or having to sign into each app individually," he said. "Those are the two options on the web. Why not for mobile? Just make it so that you log into your phone once, and then everything that you do on your phone is social.
"For platforms that are really important, but are hard to penetrate, like iPhone, we'll just do as much as we can. For Android, we can customize it a bit more. Other folks are going to want to work with us on specific things. But, our goal is not to build a phone that competes with the iPhone or anything like that."
In short, Facebook isn't planning an equivalent to the Nexus One, but it wants every phone to be a ‘Facebook Phone'.
If Zuck thought that would be the end of the speculation then he's sorely mistaken. This morning the anticipated INQ Facebook phone was once more written about, this time by Bloomberg. There doesn't seem to be anything especially new here; if Facebook is working with INQ that's reasonably consistent with what Zuck said above.
The big underlying issue is how big a piece of the mobile Internet pie Facebook is trying to grab. In the interview Zuck said that Facebook is already more than just an app - it's a platform. A lot of people use it for other things like gaming.
Whether or not a phone comes out with Facebook branding on it is not so much significant for the phone itself, but as an indicator of Facebook's ambitions and how big a threat it poses to the big mobile Internet incumbents like Apple and Google. This is the reason the speculation about a Facebook phone won't go away anytime soon.
