Sorry this blog hasn’t been updated for a couple of weeks – but luckily (for you lot) there comes a point where the holidays and weddings come to an end and I have to get my head down and earn a crust! We’ll jump straight back in with this story that I saw this morning on TechCrunch about Facebook’s rumoured new venture that has been dubbed Project Spartan.
Essentially it is meant to be a Trojan Horse for Facebook to integrate its social layer into various different mobile platforms, rather than building their own phone or creating its own mobile operating system. The premise, in the case of Apple and the iPhone, is the development and release of numerous HTML5 applications which would allow Facebook to create a range of mobile apps without having to adhere to the rules and charges imposed by Apple’s app-store.
And if we extrapolate this idea, they could even go as far as developing a whole ‘suite’ of individual yet interconnected native apps for iPhone and iPad, allowing a number of interactions within different facets of Facebook, based entirely upon your friends’ activity. So essentially you could have separate apps for messaging, sharing photos and videos, taking in your news feed, playing games, asking questions etc. At the moment there is apparently no evidence to suggest that this is the plan, but it is certainly within the realm of possibility for Facebook to achieve this, given the amount of resources at its disposal and the gargantuan user base that is already established.
This story is looked at in more depth in the original article on TechCrunch, and there is further discussion of Project Spartan on Quora.
But what are your views? Are you happy with the nuts and bolts of Facebook all clustered together as we currently have in the Facebook iPhone and Android app, or would you prefer to pick and choose which elements of the social network you’d like to run on your mobile device, as Project Spartan looks set to deliver? Please leave your views and opinions in the comments section below.