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I'll bet its not a hardware phone. Rather a kind of Skype/Google Voice feature that will be added to its mobile clients. On your Facebook app for iphone example, there will be a new icon called "Phone" in addition to the existing News Feed, Inbox, Events, Photos etc.
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But Facebook can/does already do all that on existing mobile platforms. Developers are usually more than happy to use tools provided by Facebook in exchange for getting easy social features and access to FB's social graph. Widespread use in 3rd party apps on all mobile platforms will give Facebook a much larger reach, for much less effort, than trying to launch their own phone.
I didn't make it clear in my earlier post, but I was thinking a physical context-aware "Like" button on the phone, like the search button on Android phones. You're right though, all of these features can be achieved on existing phones, but at a much higher price point. The article suggests that Facebook is targeting the $50 phone market to get the phones into as many hands as possible. That's a different market from…
Not what Kin turned out to be, but what Kin was originally intended to be: the phone that is to social networking what the Blackberry is to enterprise email.
As mentioned in the grandparent post, Microsoft's dragged-out WinMo refactoring of Kin cost them their original deal with Verizon, but there's no reason Facebook couldn't negotiate a similar or even better deal for cheap data plans for the Farmville crowd. What Facebook would have to do to stand a chance is to go head-to-head with prepaid MVNOs and outgun them on features and Facebook integration while staying roughly within their price range.
The problem with the Kin was that it ultimately became lost in delusions of competing with mainstream smartphones instead of concentrating on its core competencies. The Facebook phone would have to have no such illusions, competing instead with two-year-old Kyocera featurephones that kids buy for $39.95 contract-free, but delivering a much better Facebook experience for very little more.
I don't buy this at all. Apple has always been a hardware and software company with a very specific philosophy about user experience being everything. The digital music revolution gave Steve Jobs the opening to create the iPod that basically resurrected the company. That ply has been extended into phones and mobile computing. Google is (from a revenue perspective) a search and advertising company. Their business mode…
That's a very poor analogy--selling Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, Windows, Office, and AdWords are profitable and lucrative business models, while owning social data is only a potential basis for a future business model. How do you turn that social data into revenue? Sell phones to your users with a persistent connection to the social graph? That's a reasonable pivot. The social graph is a value-add to the phone, not an end in itself, not until they find some other way of monetizing it.
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Building a reliable network to support these phones, a solution to all of our connectivity problems.
If you think about it for a second, we still don't have that great mobile-only social app yet. The mobile versions of FB etc. won't cut it if the next 5-10 years are going to be all about mobile. IMO, FB is extending its vertical with a mobile-only social app AKA the "FB OS."
Yeah, if.
I don't buy this at all. Apple has always been a hardware and software company with a very specific philosophy about user experience being everything. The digital music revolution gave Steve Jobs the opening to create the iPod that basically resurrected the company. That ply has been extended into phones and mobile computing. Google is (from a revenue perspective) a search and advertising company. Their business mode…
Facebook is all about capturing and cultivating your relationships. They are a silo. They want to own that data because that data is their business and their entire value. Integration with everything else is about allowing other people to give Facebook more data. That's a very poor analogy--selling Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, Windows, Office, and AdWords are profitable and lucrative business models, while owning soc…
Indeed,
Has there even been an entity having only "a potential basis for a future business model" that has grown so large it can out to whole other industries?
I don't understand where they're coming from. Android's Facebook integration is a little rough, but all the problems are with the Facebook application. When it comes to the article's touted benefits of deep integration in the OS - calling a friend, deep syncing contacts, etc, Android does it all already. I have it set to only sync contacts that are already in my phone, but if a friend texts me who has their number on…
You're spot on - I have trouble believing that they're really going to put in all the effort to build an entire OS when they could achieve exactly the same end result by merely finishing their freaking Android app . Thus far, Facebook hasn't even proven that they can competently develop a mobile app , let alone an operating system. Even if the issue isn't talent, but resource allocation, are we really to expect that…
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People hate everything. The big banks and airlines all rate at the bottom of customer satisfaction surveys, and yet they're big because everyone does a lot of business with them. People complain, but they don't change who they do business with. I think a Facebook phone will be massively successful on name alone.
Change takes time. People started seriously thinking about/hating big banks right after the financial collapse, so it's only been about 2 years. As a simple example more people are starting to use credit unions: http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100... Change is never instant, it takes time for alternatives to develop and for people to buy in.
Not true at all. The Consumerist has had a category for each of the big banks forever. People hate those overdraft fees.
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But they outsource the actual manufacturing to FoxConn.
The point is that outsourcing the manufacturing (like Apple) is extremely different from outsourcing the hardware design. That the iPhone's hardware and software is designed under one roof is a huge advantage. It's extremely unlikely that Facebook has hired out the hardware engineering and industrial design teams needed to go the Apple route. If they were doing that, someone would have probably noticed by now.
Letts' Law: All programs evolve until they can send email. Zawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. I propose a new law: Every website calling itself a platform will attempt to incorporate the functionality of all other platforms that are popular at the time. Having a phone for your platform is just another silly functionality that may or may not pan out in the end for any given platfo…