(Photo by Lucascepeda and modified with permission)
I believe we will see more and more application specific mobile devices over the next 24 months.
As both consumers and business users deal with "social exhaustion" and look for help filtering the streams of information coming their way, some will seek purpose built, integrated application + mobile device solutions as their filter.
With all the chatter on the potential of a Facebook Phone, I thought I'd dig around for earlier thinking on the concept and reasoning.
I found posts by Arrington, Rubel and Sanford helpful. Some of their key points:
Michael Arrington on Facebook secretly building a Phone:
"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. Which is exactly what Apple and everyone else does, too.
Specifically, Facebook wants to integrate deeply into the contacts list and other core functions of the phone. It can only do that if it controls the operating system.
Two high level Facebook employees – Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos – are said to be secretly working on the project, which is unknown even to most Facebook staff.
Both have deep operating system experience.
Hewitt helped create the Firefox browser and was working on Parakey before it was acquired by Facebook in 2007. Parakey, which never launched, was described as a “Web-based operating system.” Hewitt also created all of Facebook’s iPhone web apps and then native apps, but finally quit building for the iPhone in disgust late last year. But he knows operating systems and he knows mobile.
Papakipos also has a perfect background for this project. He was leading the Google Chrome OS project until June. He then quit and went to Facebook. Papakipos is considered a rockstar developer, and there are any number of jobs he’d be able to do at Facebook.
But that doesn’t answer the question of why he’d leave the Chrome OS project before it was finished. It would have taken something really interesting to lure him away. Something like a Facebook Phone, for example.
So what might this phone look and feel like? We don’t know yet. When will it be announced? Don’t know. But I’d speculate that it would be a lower end phone, something very affordable, that lets people fully integrate into their Facebook world. You call your friend’s name, not some ancient seven digit code, for example. I’d imagine Facebook wanting these things to get into as many hands as possible, so I’d expect a model at a less than $50 price. Pay your bill with Facebook Credits. Etc.
As for timing, the holiday season is always a good time to launch new products. But that may be too soon.
All we know for sure is that Hewitt and Papakipos are working on something very stealthy together. And we have a source that tells us that stealthy thing is a Facebook phone.
We’re also not discounting possible partnerships around this. Spotify was said to be working on a phone with INQ last year based on a shared investor, Li Ka-Shing. It turns out Li Ka-Shing is also a sizeable investor in Facebook. So an INQ/Facebook partnership on a phone certainly wouldn’t be a surprise."
and Steve Rubel speculated about how Facebook will need to pursue a Facebook Phone:
"...if the desktop was the battleground in the 1990s and the web was in the 2000s then mobile is where the battle for dominance will take place next.
Consider these three data points, all of which are fresh...
- According to Mary Meeker, more people will connect to the Internet via mobile devices than PCs in five years
- Forrester reports that 17% of US consumers have smartphones. (That means that 83% don't.)
- And Pew says that 55% of Americans connect wirelessly (And 45% therefore don't)
And that's just the US. Combine these three trends on a global level and it's obvious that mobile is the future. Mobile is a far far larger market than mainframes, PCs or even the web. It will have lots and lots of winners in hardware, software and services. This is why I believe Facebook can't sit on the sidelines anymore.
They will be on every device, but they eventually will try to launch their own hardware too.
... and Jamie Sanford outlines why he sees a Facebook Pad / Phone on the horizon:
Let’s face it – Facebook is almost a complete OS in and of itself. With a little development of a Lnux kernel to get a device booted and loading the Facebook environment, you’d be able to simply turn on the phone and be “in” Facebook. Think about what you use your phone/pad device for now:
Contacts
You already have contacts in Facebook. They may have phone numbers in profiles (they may have them hidden to you via privacy settings). So, how hard would it be to simply build off of that for dialing? Now all of your contact management becomes embedded in Facebook. It becomes the hub of your human interactions and that is simply used as part of the FacePad.
Location-Based Services
Facebook announced last month that it was going to start integrating more of its location-based services into the platform. Share your location and now you are leveraging a network of people to find information that is relative to where you are right now. Did a Facebook friend of yours 'like' a certain restaurant you’re near? Suddenly, that restaurant review has relevance because it’s not a stranger reviewing it – it’s a Facebook friend who you have some trust with already. The value of location-based services with friendship affinity tied to it is tremendous in creating weight of a review.
Mapping/Navigation
Remember in June of 2009 when Facebook announced that it would start showing Bing search results in Facebook? How far off do you think that Bing Maps are from being integrated into Facebook as well? And what if these maps integrated the results of the location-based services mentioned above? Yikes.
Voice Chat
Last year, Facebook announced the Vivox voice chat functionality that was coming to the site. Think of how this could now integrate into the FacePad. It would be akin to having Skype built in and could leverage your network connection vs. airtime with the cellular provider.
Once again, why is this important?
I believe we will see more and more application specific mobile devices over the next 24 months.
As both consumers and business users look for help filtering the streams of information coming their way, some will seek purpose built, integrated application + mobile device solutions as their filter.
Can a Salesforce Phone built in cooperation with RIMM be far behind?
UPDATE 9/24 - Om summarizes what he believes will be the user experience on the Facebook (INQ) Phone:
The Facebook layer, as Zuckerberg describes, will run on a thin, stripped-down version of Android. Though, if I’m Nokia, I would be making a beeline to Zuckerberg’s office right about now.
What Facebook has to do is not build the OS, but instead build a user experience based on HTML5. WebOS did a good job of building a mobile experience based on web technologies.
A consumer’s Facebook ID becomes more important than the phone number itself. Login with Facebook ID, and your social network auto-magically syncs up with the phone. (Android users have seen their Google phones do this since day one. Stacey finds it annoying.)
Facebook becomes the address book or the contact list for the phone, giving Facebook users an option to call, IM, SMS, or mail their network via the data connection. Since Facebook already has our phone numbers, it can make it easy to call other cell phones or landlines. (Again, not a big deal for Android users who have this feature at their disposal.)
As Clearspring CEO and one of our readers, Hooman Radfar, so aptly said, “Facebook is effectively a set of applications with an underlying common messaging and authentication infrastructure. So, by definition, Facebook also is a set of disparate applications (photos, inbox, chat) that is connected by a social layer.” That is why you will see Facebook apps will be separated into individual apps and subsumed into the phone experience.
For instance, Facebook photos will communicate directly with the camera and become the repository for photos, with almost no difference in the cloud and the local photo storage. Take a picture and save it to Facebook.
As Liz pointed out, Facebook can give phones presence-based intelligence based on location, scheduled events and meetings, and of course, the time of the day. You’ll see some of that in the new phone.
The news feed, too, will become part of the mobile experience. I’d say it would be a more evolved experience compared to Moto BLUR and other such efforts.
Using GPS chips, the phone will give you the ability to locate your friends. It can help get you discount coupons for local eateries and bars for example. That is why I think Facebook Places is an important initiative for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, and why it ended up acquiring the Hot Potato team.
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