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Comment by hospadam | Hacker News Reader

Personal disclosure - I'm not interested in a Facebook phone in the slightest (mostly for privacy concerns).

I think this is an interesting concept. Let's assume it is in fact a total fork of Android, in essence, a "Facebook Phone". I really think (as big as Facebook is) they will have a hard time with this. I'm not sure there is space for another type of device - even if it is a massive consumer brand.

I get the sense that a lot of people use Facebook for it's utility... but I think it has lost it's "cool factor" with the general public. I can't see a lot of people thinking "man - I really want deeper integration with Facebook!" Isn't the FB app good enough for most people?

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Don't forget that Facebook owns Instagram as well. My non-tech friends (most of them) use exactly 2 apps regularly on their phones. Facebook and Instagram. I'm not sure any of them would jump at a Facebook branded phone, but I think a phone with Instagram in mind as the key feature (e.g. an awesome camera, integrated filters, not sure what else) might strike a chord with some of my friends.

EDIT: Almost forgot about Vine. That seemed to blow up in popularity in my demographic recently here in Hawaii. if Facebook owned Vine, they would have the holy trinity of apps.

> if Facebook owned Vine, they would have the holy trinity of apps.

Just for the record, Vine belongs to Twitter, so don't count on that happening any time soon :)

"don't count on that happening any time soon :)"

If Facebook offered 20B for Twitter, would Dorsey et al sell?

Forget it, if there was a time when Facebook could have bought Twitter that might have been 4-5 years ago, but that ship sailed for good.

twitter is the more valuable company long term imo

We know that people don't like social login buttons because they believe using them will cause stuff to be posted on their behalf. I can imagine the same fear with buying a Facebook phone. "Jill just chatted with Tom, they discussed their sex life."

Jill's boyfriend is going to be so pissed.

A big part of buying behavior for phones is the carrier retail outlets pushing the phones onto potential buyers.

Facebook, like Amazon, is a company deriving revenue from its ads and content (virtual currency, etc). They could afford to sell the phones to carriers "at cost", at which point the carriers will have a HUGE incentive to sell the phones. Now of course, if they sell at 0 margin to the carriers, HTC won't be happy. But HTC is not doing well at all in terms of phone sales, and perhaps they'd be willing to sell the phone to carriers at very low margins (kind of like how LG, lagging in sales and design inspiration, partnered up with Google and sold a device, the Nexus 4, for very very cheap).

In such a case, FB phones could actually sell a decent amount.

I honestly don't know anyone who actually likes Facebook. My group of friends and I continue to use it because there just isn't any better way for us to stay in touch at scale on a day-to-day basis, and nobody really cares enough to put up with the fragmentation that moving to a different network would cause. So it's in this weird middle ground of being too important to give up outright, but not important enough to bother actually fixing.

"I honestly don't know anyone who actually likes Facebook."

That's the thing I've never understood. On the one hand, on the nightly news Facebook is discussed as if everyone has an account (and that privacy changes actually matter to most viewers). On the other hand, none of my close friends use facebook.

>none of my close friends use facebook

I'd say you're lucky. Most of my friends use Facebook. I refuse, so I'm out of touch with most of them. I figure if we aren't willing to keep in touch in other ways, our friendship isn't holding up very well anyway.

I like (the seemingly lost practice of) calling and meeting friends face-to-face

Stop living in a vacuum. One billion people have a Facebook account. It's possible that your close friends are not in that group, but the average person on Earth does, in fact, use Facebook.

"One billion people have a Facebook account." " the average person on Earth does, in fact, use Facebook."

The population of the earth exceeds 7B (http://www.census.gov/population/popclockworld.html) so in fact the average person on Earth does not use facebook

*unless you live in a vacuum where 1/7 counts as half

You have to factor in the number of people who have regular internet access though.

I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of americans ages 18-24 have a facebook account but the original quote was:

"Stop living in a vacuum ... the average person on Earth does, in fact, use Facebook."

No qualifications made for internet access

Who cares about the qualification. Your entire premise is just ridiculous.

You can't just take your single data point (my close friends aren't on Facebook) and then extrapolate it (most people aren't on Facebook).

Pedantic correction: One billion people use their Facebook account every month. There are many more than that whose account is inactive, abandoned, or not used on a monthly basis.

pedantic correction: One billion Facebook accounts are accessed every month. No third party established that each account corresponds to a unique person.

Considering the vast amount of complaints towards Facebook regarding privacy concerns, do you really think it would be in the best interest of those users to allow third parties access to all of their data to "verify" that?

1B accounts != 1B sensate human beings. thats my point, and many people seem to conflate the two

no data to support, but I'm pretty sure the amount of people with multiple facebook accounts is pretty small(at least comparatively to things like e-mail adresses)

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