Creating one from scratch to become anywhere near what facebook has is almost laughable. You were dead on in your September comments. Hopefully this integration won’t bring on more security risks, this digital security site will probably cover it if they come up, so I’ll be checking it.

On the other hand, isn’t it better to just team up with the largest player in the world? From my user perspective, it would be best – on the other hand the question also is, if Facebook will share for example e-mail contacts with Nokia, and will want to send messages via Facebook, or allow Nokia to send them through e-mail.

Normally e-mails are not accessible via Facebook for app. developers – and if Nokia does, then I believe it will be OK to move with the relationship.

It’s a complicated matter, and will be interesting to see how it gets resolved.

Otherwise on Symbian, any 3rd party developer could come in and connect phone book and Facebook contacts – that’s fairly easy.

And let’s not forget the Facebook side of things – if you have all your phone contacts on Facebook, that gives a lot of strength to these guys for moving forward and acquiring new people, as they will now about a lot of things going on.

Jan

It’s the web.

Why would a hardware manufacturer (or an operator for that matter) dare to think they should be gatekeepers of a good mobile experience on a particular online service.

Nokia’s doing a better job of providing higher level services in addition to the plastic – but still, that would suggest they should compete with Facebook.

This is like AOL doing a deal with Compaq to get their web shortcut on a default PC install in the mid 90s. BFD.

Anyway, all that aside, they should hook up with LinkedIn instead. A far more lucrative, aligned, demographic for the ‘professional’ aspect of the Nokia brand.

Back to why a manufacturer or operator branded social network will fail: a) if you are a social netowrk user, well then you have by definition already made a choice and invested time to fill your profile and nurture that network. Hard to make the person shift then b) consumers gather in networks and tribes around common interests and passions. That is seldom a phone or an operator brand. Some in our industry might actually think so. If so that is just a sign that it is time for them to change jobs or at least get out in the real world and see how things work outside. That’s the danger of working too long in our overly tech- and acronym heavy industry that historically has made a joke of itself in terms of really connecting to people other than the person with the purse to pay for the latest network upgrade etc.