Big rumors seem to emerge about social networking giant looking into options of building their own brand of phone. Which was immediately denied by Facebook spokes person stating “The story, which originated in Techcrunch, is not accurate, Facebook is not building a phone.” But what looks like the Facebook would be doing is to look for hardware partners like Motorola, Samsung or HTC to build the phone take an existing OS like Android and deeply embed Facebook software into contacts of the phone.
This does not really surprise me because every major Internet giant is trying something or other to make a better social networking site. For example, Google will be rolling out soon a social networking concept; that would enable users to log on to existing sites or create new accounts and then differentiate your contacts. Users will have both office and college friends added as contacts in the same account. Everyone can see everybody’s posts, pics, videos etc. But that is not necessarily good. Google will ofter a solution to have the same account but users can “be different person, with different people.”
One more story suggesting this Facebook phone rumour is Android’s lead project manager Erick Tseng leaving Google and joined Facebook as head of mobile products.
If Facebook would like to retain its dominance in social networking business I guess it would need to do something like this. But trouble is, its not easy to believe what all Fasebook says or the rumours that we hear. Facebook once said they are making a new music service that would compete with MySpace (around 2 years ago), there is no sign of it till now. Then there was this “Facebook Wallet” which is supposed to be a competition for PayPal, later statement was it would collaborate and work with eBay-owned PayPal for the same, where users will get Facebook Credits.
Phones are the new way how people are active in social networking sites. Now a days you really do not need an expensive smart-phone to be active in social networks. Many medium end phones have started to support these and all you need is an active mobile network connection.
What’s arguably the biggest disappointment in phone industry “The Microsoft KIN phone” which was supposed to be the paradise for Social Networking users went bust, lets hope it does not happen “IF AT ALL” we see a Fasebook phone.