Facebook announced App Center yesterday. While many people seem to think this means facebook will be going into mobile OS and phone development, I personally hope they are wrong.
If Google hadn't gone into the mobile market, today we could enjoy the mix of Apple UI and Google services that I was hoping for. Instead, we have to put up with Google doing their own poor attempts at UI (Perhaps the new Google + iOS app is an exception, or the start of a new trend?) and Apple developing their own Mapping (?!?) services.
Was this really in our best interest?
Now, I hope Microsoft will be another serious contender in the mobile phone wars, which makes three options -- more than enough for anyone.
What I would love for Facebook to do is to stay device agnostic and just be the social glue between us wherever we happen to be.
What are the chances they'll do that and not screw it up by getting into the mobile game? Pretty good. They've been very savvy until now. It really seems like they're looking to be the definitive App discovery source and in that case it would benefit them greatly to remain impartial. (aside from their clear partiality towards apps that leverage the facebook platform)
On the other hand, if they went into the handset business it would be a net loss for all of us. They're the only company that really understands social. It's bad enough suffering through Google's repeated attempts at social networks, if Microsoft and Apple needed to make serious attempts too, I'd really be worried.
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