Facebook Recruiting Former Apple iPhone Engineers for Facebook Phone

[tekno]

Whilst I can't imagine this would ever succeed and I certainly would never buy it (considering I recently deleted my FB account), I can see the thinking behind it.

The mobile phone is the ultimate 'keep-in-touch' device. With it you can call, video call, message and email your friends. And Facebook wants to be (is?) the most used keep-in-touch portal.

To have a Facebook phone that is 100% intergrated into Facebook makes sense. If only to Facebook themselves.

 

[Saladinos]

Oh man, I need to take on some derivates that FB's stock will tank.

Facebook is just an app. Mark Zuckerberg needs to get over his ego.

Even this whole "sign in with Facebook"/"Facebook as an app platform" type thing is just horse****. FB doesn't even really know how to make serious money from it - they just want all your activities to go through them as a middleman, so they can watch you and hopefully market that data to someone.

Mark: if you're reading this, get back to your tropical beach. Seriously, at its current rate of bad-decision-making, Facebook isn't going to last 5 years.

 

[olowott]

come on Seriously

so how do you get everyone to leave their current phone and world of apps to move over, and yeah what OS?

 

[Mallycat]

Facebook developing a phone? That makes as much sense to me as Ellen creating a TV.

 

[champ01]

Be smart and delete your Facebook account NOW

Stop these companies from taking that little privacy you've got left.
Let Facebook die on Wall street. They deserve it!

It is possible to delete your account (look in the settings)
If Facebook gives you a hard time, demand it or sue them.


If you vote me down you're probably a Facebook junkie.

 

[mabaker]

I think it's kind of quaint that Mark thinks he is the next Steve Jobs. He is not.

 

[KnightWRX]

It's funny how everyone is sooo shocked by this when Facebook have been in the phone biz for a while. Heck, the "Facebook phone" was released last year, made by HTC and running Android (Facebook could do what to Google with a Facebook phone again ?) :

For a bunch of self-proclaimed tech enthusiasts, you guys sure have bad memories about actual tech outside of Apple.

 

[mazz0]

The company already has incredibly popular mobile apps for iOS and Android

Popular? Everybody hates the Facebook app! Because it's rubbish!

 

[Compile 'em all]

Be smart and delete your Facebook account NOW

Stop these companies from taking that little privacy you've got left.
Let Facebook die on Wall street. They deserve it!

It is possible to delete your account (look in the settings)
If Facebook gives you a hard time, demand it or sue them.


If you vote me down you're probably a Facebook junkie.

wow! your use of big bold letters really convinced me.

 

[mukade]

My inside contacts tell me that the prototype phone has no screen.

It is just an iphone-sized piece of plastic with a big 'like' button in the centre.

 

[bigchrisfgb]

By using a Facebook phone.... You agree that all conversations can/will be recorded and sold to affiliates and non affiliates. You also agree that anything else such as GPS location, texts, pictures and voicemails are rightfully ours to do what we please.

Exactly. It will be so built into your FB account it will be unbearable. You will have statuses saying you have made a hone call to such and such, such and such has rang you and you talked to them for 15 minutes, you sent a text, replied to a text, you sent a picture message which will insert your private picture you sent onto your FB account. I have FB but I choose what I wish to put on there (which is very little) I wouldn't want a phone integrated with my FB account. If I do I have an app for it.

 

[orfeas0]

I like how everyone's bashing on facebook for something we have no idea about.

You don't know, it might be even better than android (I would say iOS too but this is macrumors, so I won't).

Facebook already is a huge platform, it's like a second internet, where every company and person that has a www address also has a facebook account!

So if they could do a deep integration of facebook into a mobile phone, and make ALL facebook apps accessible to that phone, it would be kind of a big deal.

 

[Shasterball]

My mother and my aunts really treat Facebook like it is the Internet.

Facebook can be the new AOL!

"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[.]" That's like worrying that tires will become just another car part.

 

[knightlie]

If they write software for it that's as good as the current Facebook iPhone app, then they're onto a winner....

As someone once said, it's all about the software.

The current Facebook iPhone app is a stinking pile of manure.

 

[paulm22]

Leave the audience wanting more rather than them thinking they've had enough.

I wouldn't want this phone.

I already think it's too much with my facebook feed being filled with newspaper articles my friends are reading. We don't need to know everything about everyone. It's getting to the point where everyone stops paying attention to it all because they have stopped caring.

 

[vrDrew]

The sheer arrogance of these Facebook people is something to behold.

How many engineers does Facebook think Samsung have working on mobile phones? Nokia? HTC? Motorola?

Sure: "We're Facebook. We've got a few billion dollars of new investors money kicking around. Why don't we poach a handful of Apple engineers, we'll stick our logo on a third-rate cheap Chinese-made handset, and graft an extra horrid-looking Facebook skin on last years Android, and then we can be playaz too!"

Tip to Facebook: Learn how to make money in the business you are good at first.

 

[50548]

Tip to Facebook: Learn how to make money in the business you are good at first.

Are they good at anything? Because the only thing they ever did was to gain more scale than competitors such as Friendster, Orkut et al (i.e., you have to be there because your girlfriend/wife wants you to)...not to mention the gazillions of ads and privacy violations all over that thing.

By the way, the FB app on iPad is absolutely horrendous, as well as those stupid games which keep asking you to sign in with your FB account. I do NOT want people to know which game or app I am using!

The "genius" of Mark Sugarloaf was to be rich enough to attend Harvard with a few of their fellow buddies such as Eduardo Saverin (the millionaire Jewish-Brazilian guy who fled Brazil because of "alleged" kidnapping risks) and have sufficient spare time in their hands to develop a "new" social network - nothing else.

 

[KnightWRX]

The sheer arrogance of these Facebook people is something to behold.

How many engineers does Facebook think Samsung have working on mobile phones? Nokia? HTC? Motorola?

Sure: "We're Facebook. We've got a few billion dollars of new investors money kicking around. Why don't we poach a handful of Apple engineers, we'll stick our logo on a third-rate cheap Chinese-made handset, and graft an extra horrid-looking Facebook skin on last years Android, and then we can be playaz too!"

Tip to Facebook: Learn how to make money in the business you are good at first.

Why are you so mad ? Arrogance ? It's just a company continuing something they've been working on for a while and getting talent to make it better.

The Facebook phone was released last year. Was it successful ? No. Was Apple's first phone successful ? Heck no.

Some of the people here amaze me, if this story was about Apple getting Facebook engineers to make Ping better, you'd bet you and everyone else that's pissing in Facebook's cereal would be cheerleading like no tomorrow.

Drop the mass subjectivity and side-picking. Apple, Facebook, both are just faceless corporations. No one is harming you or your family, there's no reason to get pissed off at any of this.

 

[whodareswins]

If they write software for it that's as good as the current Facebook iPhone app, then they're onto a winner....

As someone once said, it's all about the software.

I hope your being sarcastic. The facebook app is shockingly bad.

 

[charlesdayton]

This rummor does not make much sense.

Facebook is strictly a social network company with some mobile apps to access their network. They are not a hardware or software company.

 

[KnightWRX]

This rummor does not make much sense.

Facebook is strictly a social network company with some mobile apps to access their network. They are not a hardware or software company.

Then why did they release the HTC Status (HTC ChaCha) in partnership with HTC last year ? They've been working on this for a while, for over a year!

The "Facebook phone" is not something new.

 

[genovelle]

By using a Facebook phone.... You agree that all conversations can/will be recorded and sold to affiliates and non affiliates. You also agree that anything else such as GPS location, texts, pictures and voicemails are rightfully ours to do what we please.

Sounds a lot like Android to me. Google already does all of this.

 

[diamond.g]

I hope your being sarcastic. The facebook app is shockingly bad.

Is there an official FB app that isn't?

 

[slackpacker]

Yea!! a FB Phone!!.. Another service I can give away every shred of info I have to corporations so they can sell it and track you.

 

[iisdan]

Nooo

WHYYYY it's already hard enough to develop for ios, android, windows phone, and blackberry... why do we need another