Facebook | interlucation

Nov 05 2010

facebook phone – the gist of it

Facebook apparently doesn’t really want to market their own phone. However, they do want to have a presence on every phone and mobile device, something which would make them much more pervasive than if they were just marketing a mobile phone. That is detailed along with some other FB news in this Wired blog piece. The idea is that FB would be the single sign-on for all applications and allow for location awareness all the time, and offer deals around that awareness. Zuckerberg equates that with a disruptive technology (as described in Clayton M. Christensen‘s book, The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth) and states that FB wants to be part of that disruption.

Then there is Gist which is an online contacts management system. In order for that service to work, one needs to enter a lot of personal data. Some of the comments over at Metafilter demonstrate that the idea may not be popular with everyone, but Gist is off the ground and online. At the very basic core there seems to be little difference in this idea and the Facebook single sign-on we-know-where-you-are-idea.

The service Gist offers might seem to be equally disruptive although Gist is more up front about it than the seemingly benign Facebook single sign-on service. Still, Gist doesn’t have a user base of 500M and growing like Facebook and that puts Facebook at the distinct advantage of being part of that disruption. Either way, a lot of information is being passed from users to someplace else.