Written by: Eric Steckel & Enrique Zabala
eric@bars-tone.com / enrique@bars-tone.com

TechCrunch has revealed further details about the not-so-secret Facebook phone.  Mark Zuckerberg is quoted as saying that “Our goal is to make it so there’s as little friction as possible to having a social experience.”  We’ve been using the Facebook iPhone App for a year now and don’t really see the friction.

TechCrunch posits that Facebook will make your entire phone “social”.  We’re not sure what that really means, but we can only think about one thing: The “Kin”. The Kin phone was a Microsoft phone manufactured by Sharp and released last April. The phone was built with a social media interface with Facebook and Twitter. Targeted to teens and social networking addicts, poor sales and tepid reviews killed the Kin only two months after its release.

Facebook has revealed that their phone will run on the Android Operating System, which means they have definitely established their alliances with Google.  For now, Facebook does not plan to create their own Operating System.  Zuckerberg tells TechCrunch: “I think everything is going to be shades of integration, rather than starting from the ground up and building a whole system.”

It remains to be seen whether Facebook will be as outrageously successful in the mobile phone business as Apple and Google have been in the past couple years, or a failure like Microsoft.  One thing is certain:  a “social” phone has already hit the market and failed.

In related news, Forbes Magazine announced its list of richest Americans.  Wouldn’t you know it but Mark Zuckerberg, at #35 on the list, is already worth more than Steve Jobs, who is listed at #42.  All of which leads us to ask- is Mark Zuckerberg ready to eat Steve Jobs’ lunch?

Sources:
TechCrunch

Tags: Apple, facebook, Facebook Phone, Google, iPhone, Kin, Kin Phone, Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft, Social Media, Steve Jobs, Techcrunch