The Facebook Phone is Coming

After years of considering how to best get into the phone business, Facebook has tapped Taiwanese cellphone maker HTC to build a smartphone that has the social network integrated at the core of its being.

Code-named “Buffy,” after the television vampire slayer, the phone is planned to run on a modified version of Android that Facebook has tweaked heavily to deeply integrate its services, as well as to support HTML5 as a platform for applications, according to sources familiar with the project. The Facebook Phone

Precisely how all this will play out is hard to envision. People now can use Facebook on virtually all smart phone operating systems and devices. So what Facebook seeks is a much-deeper integration of the Facebook experience with the devices. It might be way too simplistic to say Facebook probably is looking to control a fuller range of the end user experience on a Facebook-optimized mobile, but that is as close to an explanation as seems possible, right now.


The whole point of Android, the Google ecosystem; and Apple and the iOS ecosystem, is to leverage user experience on mobiles into mobile commerce, mobile advertising and other developing revenue streams. Facebook probably assumes its own experience likewise needs to become a business platform, as Google and Apple seem to be attempting.