Facebook hiring iPhone engineers

Not sure why we or they need a Facebook phone, surely it would be better to just integrate the site better into existing phones? The Facebook mobile phone app is shockingly bad - slow, unreliable, and missing lots of functionality. I usually find it better to browse the full web version of Facebook on my Android phone than use their app, although all the point and hover functions they have on the site and the messy layout and profusion of pop-up windows makes that tricky too. Let's hope they're improving that side of things before trying to build an entire phone around it...

Posted:A year ago

Facebook is already fairly well integrated into WP7, your Facebook friends and contacts are integrated, texting,msn and FB personal messaging are done from one messaging tile, there is a personal tile that allows you to view your wall and update status without using a dedicated app or is, and your fb photos are viewable in your photos. It's hard to see how much more a fb phone will let you do, other than maybe playing Farmville without a native app.
If Facebook goes too far with its own phone, will it be at the detriment of relationships with iOS and Android, or will it use modified Android like the Kindle Fire?

I really don't see how creating a mobile phone in the near future so that Facebook will not simply become an app on other mobile platforms (to paraphrase), will be of benefit unless they are going to get a massive market share, which I would think would be difficult when it is sold on the strength of FB, which who his available on every competitor, and in the case of WP7, done very well. Perhaps improving the cruddy official FB smartphone apps would be a much better use of resource.

Posted:A year ago

Who in their right mind would buy a Facebook phone? We're already worried about the tracking that our Android and Apple phones go through. We're going to buy a Facebook phone, where that kind of thing is baked in!?

Then again, when I consider most of my own Facebook friends... they're not smart enough to care. So yeah, I can see this succeeding.

Posted:A year ago