MocoNews says that Nokia and Facebook are in talks over some sort of big deal that will see Facebook get prominent placement in Nokia handsets, and could see Nokia take a stake in the social-networking site.
A few thoughts:
- While Facebook is, without a doubt, pretty damn popular, will it be able to escape the faddishness of nearly every social network that’s come before it? The bad PR it’s generated lately over privacy and the Beacon fiasco indicate that it could fall pretty hard. And things could get even worse if they shut down Scrabulous 
- If this deal goes through, for it to work, it will require some serious work to better integrate Facebook and mobile devices. Facebook’s mobile web site is fine, and its BlackBerry application is pretty decent — but they both are designed to use mobile as just an access mechanism, they don’t really do much to take advantage of mobility to add anything new to the Facebook experience.
I also worry a little bit that lining up with Facebook could cause Nokia, or any other handset vendor for that matter, to miss the bigger social-networking opportunity that lies before them. Mobile networks are, by far, the biggest social networking services — they connect people with their friends and family, colleagues and contacts, and the world as a whole. They use a variety of media to do this, all centered around communication and experience-sharing. They have a familiar and easily understood interface — the phonebook app and the keypad — and they’re essentially open, so people can communicate with most anybody they want, they just have to have a phone (or email or whatever), they don’t have to be a member of a certain site.
Facebook’s big strategic push lately has been to enable applications to run on its platform, so developers can offer services to its users and enhance the value of its network. Mobile has been doing this for some time, and even offers developers multiple avenues for monetization.
The point here is that mobile phones are already immensely popular, pervasive and effective social devices. That’s not to say they’re fully built out for social networking, or that they can’t be improved upon. But that improvement won’t be from bolting on a Facebook link on a device’s homepage or creating some mobile app to access existing web features. It’s going to be driven by and derived from the mobile experience and lifestyle, not by just giving mobile access to a service designed for the PC web.
—–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo
