Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied the rumors on mobile phones

Facebook held a mobile-focused event by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and announced to updates company's iPhone applications yesterday. Mark Zuckerberg denied recent rumors that Facebook plans to develop mobile phones in the conference.

Zuckerberg said Facebook now has 200 million mobile service users. He denied that the Facebook will develop own brand mobile phone plan at the press conference.

Headlining Facebook's event were updates to Places, the location-based features that the social network announced back in August. Places allows Facebook users to "check-in" to a business or other location and then share posts and media about that location. Unlike other location-based social networks like Gowalla and Foursquare, though, Facebook also allows users to check their friends into a place, as long as the friend opts into this ability by turning on the feature in their privacy settings.

Don't worry about getting spammed with coupons if you use Facebook on your iPhone, though, because Facebook's updated iPhone app will only highlight retailers with deals in the Places list. If you don't ever stumble into the Places section, you should never be bothered with any of these coupons.

During a Q&A session at the end of Facebook's event, someone asked founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg why his company has yet to release an official iPad app, leaving the space to third-party apps like Friendly and Social.

To be more precise, as noted in the comments below, Mr. Zuckerberg said specifically, “iPad isn’t mobile,” which means that he doesn’t think it competes in the mobile phone space.

Which means that while Apple might consider iPhone and iPad as kindred spirits due to their shared OS, Facebook doesn’t. In fact, when Mashable’s Ben Barr said to the two execs that Apple would disagree on this issue, Mr. Zuckerberg said in his usual straight forward manner, “Well, sorry.”

Mr. Tseng then stepped in to say that the company is still trying to work out its approach to the tablet market, which suggests that Facebook is looking to bring Facebook to the tablet market as a whole in a unified way.

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