Facebook Tries Again on a Smartphone

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/facebook-tries-tries-again-on-a-smartphone/

by tayeed • 14 years ago

46 40 14 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

It should be titled "Facebook tries to obtain a platform that it controls so that it isn't reliant on others".

amartya916• 14 years ago

"It could easily scoop up an infirm company like Research in Motion, which is valued at less than $6 billion, and drop a beautifully designed Facebook operating system on top of RIM’s phones."

I find this to be an affront to engineers and designers. It trivializes the amount of time and effort it takes to make a well engineered product.

Can someone elucidate why it might be important for Facebook to have it's own hardware? Why wouldn't apps on an Android or iOS or Windows Phone be good enough (of course with seamless integration like Twitter on iOS)?

P.S. With Facebook's current alliance with MS, doesn't Windows Phone make for a good platform to build upon. Note, I believe that Windows Phone will eventually take off.

ConstantineXVI• 14 years ago

Not being totally integrated leaves them vulnerable to being replaced. Windows Phone isn't an option, it has no room for customization at all.

majormajor2• 14 years ago

Facebook is already quite (but not perfectly—the big thing I've noticed is that the non-chat "messages" part of FB requires going into the FB app) well integrated into Windows Phone. And unless they have some truly groundbreaking interface ideas, I'd also rather see them continue to work more with MS on integrating into and pushing that platform, rather than introducing yet another one.

Also, does RIM have particularly nice phones, hardware-wise, these days? Another reason I'd rather see them work with MS is that then anything particularly cool they bring to the software side could run on gorgeous Nokia hardware.

slantyyz• 14 years ago

>> I find this to be an affront to engineers and designers. It trivializes the amount of time and effort it takes to make a well engineered product.

Doubly so, because RIM's previous management's product roadmaps and actions (i.e., let's just buy QNX and TAT - we'll have something workable in no time!) were an affront to engineers and designers.

toyg• 14 years ago

Their current mobile offer is... underwhelming. This is mostly due to them not being able to integrate deeply with any platform, because they don't control anything else in the stack (browser -> OS -> hardware). They seem to be looking for ways to fix this by acquiring other layers, starting from the browser -- they're in talks with Opera. This rumour about them building hardware goes in the same direction.

The real key, however, is the OS layer; they cannot really use Android, for obvious reasons, but I can't see any other mobile OS lying around, after the Great Purge of 2011 that killed Maemo/Meego, WebOS and pretty much everything else except iOS and Android. Betting on Windows Phone is extremely risky at the moment, and anyway Ballmer has his own priorities which may or may not align with Zuckerberg's.

tmurray• 14 years ago

Why couldn't they fork Android in exactly the same way Amazon has done with the Kindle Fire?

notatoad• 14 years ago

It's about control. On my smartphone, its easy to start using google plus instead of Facebook. If I had bought a Facebook phone, they could lock it in to Facebook services so that i use Facebook as my primary social network for at least the life of my phone.

Also, it's a revenue stream. Facebook has a huge userbase but very few of their users actually pay them money. If they started selling hardware they could collect money from those users.

superuser2• 14 years ago

Also it's about the control that Facebook, like Apple, might be able to deliver better UX if they could design for and thoroughly test on very specific combinations of hardware, instead of trying to function across so many different chips and screen sizes.

sidman• 14 years ago

i somewhat feel this is facebook trying to justify the massive IPO money and hence expanding into other areas that will make use of this money. Its the typical scenario were a company gets more funding then they probably need and in turn leads to that company addressing areas they might not have, given they had less money.

Facebook should get into mobile hardware but not in such a short time. Im sure there is lower hanging fruit they should be aiming for that could help boost their revenue many times over and get them back in the good graces of their shareholders again (if they care about that :) ).

If they get into the mobile space by having their own device it seems like such a high barrier simply to add to their advertising revenue, it almost seems like they are leaving their web and mobile apps business cause in terms of revenue, what they have (in web and mobile apps) is all they can figure out and NOW they need a new platform to expand on ?!

smokeyj• 14 years ago

FB OS. AKA Root-kit.

drcube• 14 years ago

I was surprised to read that Facebook has its own operating system. Does anybody know anything about this?

Count me in as someone who would never use a Facebook phone. Might as well use a CIA phone. I'm all for watching the competition though.

majormajor2• 14 years ago

From the link in that paragraph to the Facebook App Center page, it sounds to me like they're referring to the Facebook platform itself as an OS. Which I suppose is fair in a way, with all the services it offers, but it's hardly a mobile phone OS in its current state.

maclaren• 14 years ago

I doubt they will roll an entire mobile operating system in the time frame mentioned. A kindle-esque customized Android phone seems more likely.

mgkimsal2• 14 years ago

They could try to revive webOS - certainly a lot of work already gone in to that.

conipto• 14 years ago

FacePalm?

mgkimsal2• 14 years ago

Touché!

lucianm• 14 years ago

If Facebook buys RIM, we're screwed.

objclxt• 14 years ago

I think more aptly, if Facebook buys RIM they're screwed.

It's just crazy talk. Facebook has a headcount of 3,500, and people seriously think they can feasible buy out RIM, with 17,500 people, and then just magically integrate them and poof produce a great phone? It's madness.

If you take the article at face value, Facebook have already tried developing their own hardware and had it implode due to a lack of experience. So for the author to seriously suggest the solution should be to acquire HTC or RIM when Facebook have equally little experience doing large mergers and acquisitions makes no sense to me.

HorizonXP• 14 years ago

TBH, if Facebook was serious about producing their own phone, buying RIM and letting it operate as a subsidiary would be a wise move.

RIM/QNX make great hardware and (now) software. No one would disagree that they need help on the user experience side of things. They've made great strides in this area too, but that's where Facebook can help. RIM can stick to what it's good at.

That said, I really hope that doesn't happen.

jiggy20113• 14 years ago

I know a fair number of people who bought smartphones for the specific purpose of using facebook on the move. Even for those who didn't it's often a big use case.

I wonder if facebook could release it's own phone (linked to a FB account) and then restrict access of other smartphones to it's platforms and APIs (so that they become a crippled shell) while adding features that were exclusive to the FB phone.

Could dominate the entire smartphone game in one move.

mayanksinghal• 14 years ago

On the other hand, I think it would be suicidal. While I agree that the phones of some (may be many) might be utilized solely for the purpose of checking Facebook regularly and on the move; there are still other reasons why people prefer one phone over other.

They have already opened up enough APIs to allow for decent third party clients - if they make a policy to withdraw it, developers and users who have already bought a smartphone will not only panic but probably revolt as well.

Alienating existing userbase, when alternative platforms like Quora are just starting to get very popular would be suicidal. In fact my university is already seeing a mass migration from Facebook to Quora and reddit (and HN).

jiggy20113• 14 years ago

Things like Quora and reddit aren't really FB substitutes (at least for most people) although I suppose they could be at risk from Google+.

They would have to stop this from becoming just another "me too" phone , the only way I can think of doing that would be to somehow leverage their existing userbase and make sure that using FB from their phone is a much better experience. The only way I can think of them doing that is by restricted what other phones can actually do.

signalsignal2• 14 years ago

Sorry, but even Apple, who develops its own operating system, didn't develop it own system from scratch(1). The iOS platform is an adaption of this as well, meaning it is not a unique system.

One of the challenges of creating a startup is building a business which not only provides solutions/products to customers, but also works with other businesses. Attempting to cripple competitors platforms will quickly and easily be interpreted as monopolistic behavior(2).

1) Originally Mach 3 to Xnu and GNU and *BSD system utilities with only a proprietary layer on top, Quartz.

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

jiggy20113• 14 years ago

Facebook has enough scale now to mean that other companies have to work around them rather than the other way around.

Whether they develop their own system from scratch or not is largely irrelevant , especially if they use BSD licensed code.

You would really be relying on a court finding them to be a monopoly which might be difficult to do if it was implemented in a subtle enough way.

keeperofdakeys• 14 years ago

While previously the Android facebook client was a native app, it recently became a webview (it also got slower because of this). I'm pretty sure the iOS app is also a webview now too. From the perspective of multi-mobile OS adoption, this makes sense. You now only need to develop a single webapp, and since you control the client apps, you can ensure 100% compatibility.

While I don't think they'll try to cripple other phones, they'll most likely make new features a priority for the facebook phone.

Tooluka• 14 years ago

Soon Facebook will acquire enough mass to cross Chandrasekhar limit and collapse into a black hole of the internet. No information will ever leave the system, its existence will be observed only by interaction with advertisement radiation in the internet. People will claim that they left FB space but that is physically impossible. Over time interstellar drift may cause FB blackhole to collide with Google or Apple galaxy. And then whole internet cluster will collapse.

koglerjs• 14 years ago

I prefer to think that it will just briefly cross the Chandrasekhar limit, spew hordes of information out of the system in a supernova brighter than the galaxy of the entire Internet, and then subside to a neutron core no one cares about.

Like MySpace. Although MySpace never really had the mass, and is I suppose currently a white dwarf.

kijin• 14 years ago

> spew hordes of information out of the system in a supernova

A massive security breach that puts everyone's personal information in the hands of lulzsec? That would be one hell of a scary spectacle...

pemulis• 14 years ago

How do you become head tech news guy at the New York Times when you think Facebook is an operating system and that the company could "easily scoop up" RIM?

lnanek2• 14 years ago

Doesn't make much sense to us techies, but maybe they'll pull some sort of business hack like amazon. Amazon ended up with the most popular Android-based tablet since they subsidized the hardware cost with their media sales and did things standard Android manufacturers wouldn't like left out cameras (which raise the cost/size/weight/power use).

Reminds me of all the talk previously about Google making a free phone service. Google and Facebook both make all their money from ads. So they might be able to do something like that, which doesn't make sense to hardware companies.

sanj• 14 years ago

...take the same approach as Amazon, offering low-cost hardware, like the Kindle, and subsidizing some of the costs through advertising.

Except that, by its own admission, Facebook hasn't figured out how to make advertising money on mobile devices.

tomwaddington• 14 years ago

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention INQ - there've been rumours around a possible linkup there for a while.

VeejayRampay• 14 years ago

Cause I'm sure the Apple engineers they snatched have no NDA whatsoever and will be able to bring the tech to Facebook in no time.

Facebook Tries Again on a Smartphone

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