Techcrunch reported over the weekend that Facebook is working on its own mobile phone, which will tightly integrate its social networking features into the device.
Facebook has said that it is “not building a phone”.
But Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington is standing by his story, noting that Apple doesn’t directly operate its own mobile manufacturing equipment either.
If the idea of a Facebook phone sounds familiar, perhaps you read FT Tech Blog’s post from February. If Techcrunch’s story is true, our crystal ball seems to have been working particularly well back then.
Christian Lindholm, director at Fjord, a mobile consultancy told us:
“As a player with a ubiquitous global phonebook and the multimodal communication platform and applications platform that Facebook provides, I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t move into phones in a couple of years.”
All those seven months ago, Facebook had a mere 100m mobile users. Now, according to Facebook’s own statistics page:
- There are more than 150m active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
- People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
- There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products.
Since February, Facebook has also launched Places, its mobile check-in service. And while third parties such as INQ have developed “social mobiles” before, Facebook would be able to keep rivals such as Twitter off its own platform. (By the by, while it’s true that INQ and Facebook share a common investor in Li Ka-shing, his $60m Facebook stake is now a drop in a $33bn ocean.)
So even if Techcrunch is wrong, there are plenty of good reasons why Facebook should certainly think about developing its own mobile device. Our advice: make a better job of it than the TwitterPeek…
