An interesting rumour has been floated by the Wall Street Journal, which suggests that Facebook has been in discussion with several lareg mobile phone manufacturers, including Nokia, Motorola and Palm, about integrating Facebook into their mobile phones.

The rumour suggests the new phones could embed Facebook info from your friends deep within your mobile phone; for example, profile info could be automatically synced with the phone’s address book, and the phone could tell the user if the person they were about to call was logged onto Facebook or not.

As for mobile Facebook status updates, well, that’s a no-brainer!

Of course, much of this can already be done to some degree on the iPhone and Android phones with a Facebook app, and also with the INQ1 Facebook phone. However, the same was said of Google before it released the Android platform, as Google search and maps were already available on mobile phones before it released its own mobile phone platform.

Although Facebook isn’t actually releasing its own platform, the analogy shows the power that can be harnessed by a Web company when its services are tightly integrated with a device as personal as a mobile phone.

Validating Android

In many ways, this validates Google’s decision to release Android. Although Google and Facebook don’t directly compete on the Web, Google needs to dominate the mobile ad arena as much as it does the Web ad space if it’s to retain its market lead as the Web goes more and more mobile. If Facebook became the default gateway to the mobile Web, it would effectively crowd Google out of that space, leaving it constrained to the diminishing desktop market.

With Android, though, Google is ahead of the curve – again!

Facebook fighting off Twitter

Another reason for Facebook to increase its mobile presence (apart from it being an obvious enxt step for the company) is the threat from Twitter, the 140 character microblogging service that’s taking the world by storm. Twitter in many ways offers nothing more than Facebook’s status feature, yet it’s currently seeing tremendous growth that undermines the need Facebook so often. If your friends are all twittering their updates, why visit Facebook to see what they’re up to?

Worse, Twitter is just at home on a mobile phone as it is on the Web, as you can send and view your tweets via SMS. If any service has the power to dominate the mobile space, it’s currently Twitter, and as the online world goes more mobile, Twitter could soon leave Facebook far behind.

Some more details of Facebook’s intentions will be released next week at MWC 2009, which is already shaping up to be a classic, despite the economic down turn. We will, as always, keep you posted.

[Source: Pocket-Lint]