First Opera, now a smartphone… next, you'll read a story about how Facebook's considering buying a television manufacturer so that everyone can enjoy social updates and sitcoms via the "FB TV."
The New York Times' Nick Bilton weighs in on the favorite Silicon Valley rumor again today, a story that's been popping up in the news circles since, what, 2010 or so? That's quite a long time for Facebook to be building or not to be building a phone, but we digress.
According to Bilton, a number of anonymous sources – including Facebook employees, engineers who have been the target of Facebook recruiting efforts, and other sources with alleged knowledge of Facebook's secret inner workings – maintain that Facebook's working to build its own smartphone.
This would be the company's third attempt at bringing a living, breathing smartphone into its core business: Initial rumors in 2010 put smartphones on Facebook's map, but the company allegedly veered away from mobile development after realizing just how difficult it is to build mobile hardware.
Rumors resurfaced in late 2011 that Facebook was planning to team up with HTC to build a Facebook-centric device, code-named "Buffy." According to an April report by AllThingsD's Ina Fried, the device is allegedly still in the works: Facebook's doing the mobile platform on top of an Android base and HTC's allegedly taking care of the hardware.
Facebook representatives didn't confirm or deny the rumors when asked by Bilton this past Friday. Rather, the company pointed the Times writer to the boilerplate statement it likely uses for such questions: "We're working across the entire mobile industry; with operators, hardware manufacturers, OS providers, and application developers," a repeat of the same statement Facebook representatives gave AllThingsD last year when the Buffy rumors first surfaced.
So, why a smartphone? Facebook is perhaps starting to realize that the future of its social platform is in the mobile space. A soup-to-nuts smartphone package would allow Facebook to essentially marry a user to the entirety of what the company has to offer – from the human connections of its social network; to its new camera app; to integrated video, messaging, and event-tracking; to a Facebook-based "app store."
"Mark is worried that if he doesn't create a mobile phone in the near future that Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms," said an anonymous Facebook employee in an interview with Bilton.
If you really line Facebook's offerings up, it's not that much of a stretch to envision them as tiny icons on a smartphone instead of links and features built into a website. And this, suggests Bilton, would put Facebook and Google directly into a bit of a spat – both due to each company's interest in the the inexpensive smartphone market, as well as the possibility that Facebook might invariably turn to Android as a base for its own mobile device.
For more tech tidbits from David Murphy, follow him on Facebook or Twitter (@thedavidmurphy).
