Rumors are interesting pieces of information. They're like oil-covered pinballs, ricocheting around from the ball shooter to one disseminator after another. Paddles keep it moving and even add a little speed and nuance to, perhaps, enhance and elevate the rumor. It keeps bouncing around until, finally, someone misses or lets the rumor go. That's what it was like watching this weekend's Facebook Phone rumor.
The tale started—as many tech rumor stories do these days—on TechCrunch. Michael Arrington's blog has lots of inside sources—good ones, I think. So I won't argue that, sometimes, TechCrunch knows things. On the other hand, I think the blog and its writers have a tendency to fall in love with an idea regardless of advisability or logic. In this case, however, the blog covered itself by making clear that Facebook was "building" a phone in much the same way you build a brand—not by physically building something but by promoting an idea through various means. A Facebook "branded" phone would be one of those means. The story gets pretty wacky, though, with the introduction of a Facebook mobile operating system. That's just what we need, one more mobile platform to further fracture and confuse the market. Google's Android—easily one of the most popular—is already in pieces. On this point, I desperately hope TechCrunch is wrong.
Even though TechCrunch did its best to equivocate in the original story, the Facebook phone rumor pretty much got away from them, and by the end of the weekend, "Facebook Phone" had become a meme on Google News and Twitter. As always, the original idea had become disassociated from the supporting information, and the concept of an actual phone built by Facebook took root. Soon Facebook PR had to stand up and say it wasn't building anything.
Personally, I don't know why anyone at Facebook bothered to respond to the rumor. Was the company afraid that its half a bullion users would start demanding a blue Facebook Phone that always opened up to your latest Facebook activities? Was it worried that more media-savvy phone users would demand a pre-load of "The Social Network?"
As much as Facebook users love the platform and all they can do with it, I don't see them clamoring for a Facebook Phone from the social networking company. This is not to say that Facebook users do not want Facebook access and features on their phones. Most smartphone owners I know already use integrated Facebook apps to access their accounts. My Blackberry Torch 9800 came pre-loaded with a Facebook app that can push notifications right to the front of my phone. Inside the app, it takes over my whole phone screen and pretty much replicates the online Facebook experience. I do not feel like I'm missing anything. So why would I need a Facebook Phone?
Now, TechCrunch is convinced that Facebook is still going the Google route and having someone else build a Facebook Phone, with a special Facebook operating system and functionality. I sometimes wonder if Google's discontinued Nexus One (it's still available to developers), a device built by HTC that features Google's Android Mobile OS, was ever really designed to be a true commercial smartphone competitor. Google never really seemed to have its heart in marketing or selling it. The Nexus One store was an abysmal failure. It now occurs to me that this was all according to plan. The true Android renaissance did not begin until after the Nexus One, and it hasn't stopped since. Google no longer needs to scare the bejesus out of other mobile phone companies: They're all clamoring to build and support better and better Android phones. Google's work here is done.
Facebook has little in common with Google when it comes to the mobile space. It has no mobile OS and would be foolish to try and build one. There are no barriers to it getting onto mobile handsets, and trying to support a platform and branded phone would only confuse customers and slow Facebook down unnecessarily.
I am not against companies slapping their branding on other products. I'm often surprised that we haven't seen the Coca-Cola or McDonald's phone. What major company or conglomerate wouldn't want its branding in the hands of thousands of customers? Slap some color and logos on the outside of the phone, make sure the background is brand-aligned, introduce a branded app that offers special, localized deals for the consumer, and you're pretty much done.
Big brands do not need to get their hands dirty with platforms and hardware. Facebook is a very big brand—Coca-Cola big. Unfortunately, it still operates like a small startup, scrambling to introduce tiny little features, doing way too much mop-up because it doesn't properly market test most of them, and, possibly, wondering if it needs to consider platforms and hardware as well. Coca-Cola and McDonald's would never do that.