The Wall Street Journal claims that Facebook is talking to Nokia, but also Palm and other mobile phone manufacturers, trying to get a deal to better integrate FacebookFacebook reviews
’s services into mobile phones.
True, there’s a Facebook application for most smartphones out there today, but there are ways to make the entire mobile Facebook experience smoother, more intuitive, and better overall. Let’s go through some examples of what we’d like to see on our phones as far as Facebook integration goes.
Contact Merging
This one is a no-brainer; when you browse through your phone contacts, wouldn’t it be nice if you could choose whether you can send them an SMS, call them, or send them a message on Facebook? It definitely beats having to fire up a Facebook app and then going through your Facebook contacts.
Photos and Videos
Facebook’s current mobile apps already lead you instantly upload a photo to Facebook right after taking it. But, when you check out the photos on your mobile phone, provided you have an internet connection, it’d be nice if you were able to see the photos on your Facebook account right there in one integrated album. The same should also be true for video.
Music
Nokia is trying very hard to integrate various music features with their phones; their “Comes With Music” program lets you buy a Nokia phone with access to millions of audio tracks. There are a couple of ways your mobile music experience could be integrated with Facebook: sharing playlists with your friends is one example, Last.FM-style tracking of your listening habits is another.
Status Updates
Facebook offers a world of possibilities to its users, but most of them (that includes me) spend most of their time there reading people’s status updates. Which is not bad at all, with the ability to like or comment on them, Facebook has turned them into a FriendFeedFriendFeed reviews
-style feed of useful info. I’d love to have the ability to receive status updates directly to my smartphone, push-style, especially if I were able to filter them to come only from certain persons or only if they have a certain amount of “likes.” Then again, I’d like to have this for FriendFeed also, but unfortunately FriendFeed isn’t big enough to negotiate a direct deal with Nokia or Palm.
Posted Items
So, you’re browsing on your mobile and you’ve found an interesting link, a photo or video you’d like to share on Facebook. Why not have the option to do that directly from the mobile browser with one click? Similar to that, if you’re writing a note, it’d be nice to have the option to save it to Facebook as a new note in addition to saving it to the phone’s memory?
Your Thoughts?
There’s plenty more that can be done, GPS-related features and events come to mind, for example. What Facebook features would you like to see integrated in your phone? Please share your opinions in the comments.
