Yesterday, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and the CrunchPad fame wrote:
Facebook is building a mobile phone, says a source who has knowledge of the project. Or rather, they’re building the software for the phone and working with a third party to actually build the hardware.
Based on my experience with the Facebook iPhone app, I hope for consumer’s sakes this never makes it to market. I and my wife (the extent of my social circle) both experience bad links, failed photo loading, and general timeline updating issues. The latest update brings a new pearl: the icon notification pops up but no new items show in the app. Worse, my wife’s randomly shows a new number every time she open/closes the app. Their current mobile development record does not give one confidence that they will deliver a “killer platform”.
As evidence of the secret project, Arrington points out that Facebook employees Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos are MIA at Facebook. Joe Hewitt was part of the iPhone app dev group at Facebook but left over Apple’s App Store policies. I would like to think he left over the dev team’s lack of ability to deliver a functioning app. But if he is, in fact developing a mobile OS I am sure he will have no trouble dealing with mobile carriers, who have such a glowing track record with devices.
Truth is, If Facebook does have a mobile OS in the works, if it is anything less than a steaming pile of crap, it will surely be a hit. I personally have no attachment to Facebook and use it much like Tina. But I know people who spend hours on it; they play the games, update, stalk exes. Kids a generation younger than me use it as their first form of communication. They don’t email, they Facebook. They put too much about their personal lives on each other’s walls and use the Facebook address book as their only contact pool. I don’t even know how to find the Facebook address book. Facebook see’s itself as one of the big boys in the valley and a mobile platform, as John Gruber points out, makes good sense.
Could be that Facebook, as a company, doesn’t want to be seen as one app among thousands in mobile app stores from Apple, Google, and Microsoft, but rather as a peer to those companies — a mobile titan with its own app store.
Of course, if Facebook is hitching its wagon to Android, they may be facing a big problem.
