Facebook Could Transform Mobile Phones

With more users accessing social networking sites from mobile phones, Facebook could redefine communications by issuing its own smartphone

By Christian Lindholm

Facebook is clearly leading the pack in the mobile Internet race. In December—in Britain alone—it racked up 5 million mobile users, against 4.5 million for all of Google's sites combined. Google (GOOG) now has its own phone, platform, and app store; more Google phones will undoubtedly follow, offering—as with its new Nexus One handset—an experience tightly integrated with Google services. But given Facebook's ever-expanding size, many mobile industry analysts are asking how long the social networking giant will be happy to work within another company's idea of how a mobile device should look and feel.

For many consumers, social networks are now the nucleus of their online existence. Being always on is hard-wired into their lifestyle. The rise of the so-called "Continuous Partial Attention" phenomenon—the desire not to miss anything, even for an instant—holds profound implications for the way we consume information. It is the impulse that has us clicking "Check Messages" on our e-mails, even when we know that they auto-update, checking our phones even when we know they haven't rung or vibrated, and texting friends when we have nothing in particular to say.

We get a buzz from being continually connected. We're getting used to an existence where we are never fully off the grid. Many phones on the market today, including Apple's (AAPL) ubiquitous iPhone, do not fully cater to this demand. If you want to scan the horizon for information on an iPhone, you can either choose to put yourself at the mercy of push notifications, or run down your battery by repeatedly opening and closing the relevant applications.

The default experience of an iPhone is glossy and beautiful, yet it's a fundamentally static experience. In a real-time world where we have come to expect a constant flow of data—where we are always scanning for new opportunities to contribute, create, and collaborate—this seems somehow insufficient and unsatisfying.

Facebook: the Web's best contact book

Apple has created a new computer-like experience on the iPhone and many smartphones now mimic its approach. But the iPhone is incapable of multitasking. To get to Facebook's activity feed on an iPhone, you need to open an application. To get to Twitter, you need to open yet another app. To make a call, you need to close other apps and navigate to the Contact Book screen or the dialer. The Contact Book screen and the dialer do not communicate with the Facebook or Twitter apps—even though many of your friends are on Facebook. Frankly, it's inefficient.

Apple's decision to make the iPhone primarily a computing device, rather than a communications device, left open an opportunity for disruptive innovation. Apple's notorious obsession for locking down its platform and ensuring that such applications as Facebook can't be deeply integrated with the Contact Book and the Photo Album detracts from the user experience. The contact list is still the most important asset on the phone and, for many users, Facebook is the most important and complete contact book on the Web.

Imagine for a minute what a Facebook-centric device might be capable of. It would have the ability to incorporate real-time information about friends at every stage of your interaction with them. The need to send expensive SMS messages would be reduced or eliminated by the ability to send a Facebook message from your phone as easily as you now send an SMS. Facebook would be the trigger for greater communication.

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