Facebook-not into building Phone!

According to TechCrunch reports, “Facebook is building the software for the phone and working with a third party to actually build the hardware. Facebook wants to integrate deeply into the contacts list and other core functions of the phone. It can only do that if it controls the operating system”, the Facebook authorities has referred to the report as false and misleading.

Facebook spokeswoman Jaime Schopflin said in an email “Facebook is not building a phone.” She even talked of a no. of ways through which the social network wants to move closer to the core of phones, such as using software development kits (SDKs) and supporting the nascent technology standard HTML5.

She wrote, “Our approach has always been to make all phones and apps more social, not build a phone. Our view is that almost all experiences would be better if they were social, so integrating deeply into existing platforms and operating systems is a good way to enable this.”

Facebook’s head of mobile Erick Tseng, in an interview talked about the future of Facebook’s mobile efforts as “stepping away from doing just one-off applications.”

He said, Facebook would be moving “towards a platform strategy -all of that great social goodness that third party developers are now enjoying for the desktop Web, they might be able to enjoy for mobile apps”.

“The beauty of having a platform play is that all of the social interactions that you are familiar with now become available throughout the entire phone,” he said. “Any app, whether it is a restaurant or shopping or a movie ticket service, can plug into this Facebook mobile platform and extract this social intelligence as if it was a utility.”

He said, “Facebook wants to bridge that physical phone experience to all that really great rich social data in the cloud. That level of personalization and context for a phone is what is going to define the next generation of user experience.”

Providing these functionalities might require deeper integration of Facebook with a phone’s operating system. For that, Facebook either has to build friendly relation with companies like Apple, Google and Blackberry that make smartphone operating systems–or make its own.