Facebook + Palm = FacePalm?

David Heath
Saturday, 24 April 2010 14:51

Your IT - Mobility

It started as a joke, but the merits of a Facebook buyout of Palm are starting to gather some weight.

We reported a couple of weeks ago that Palm was putting itself up for sale and outlined a number of potential buyers.  Of the leading contenders, it would seem that HTC has gone by the wayside and Lenovo is an improbable bidder.

Shortly after the sale became public, jokes started circulating that Facebook was a potential bidder in order to make the obvious name FacePalm.

The guys over at GigaOm have taken this theme and run a little further with it, suggesting that there might actually be some synergy in such a merger.  They point out that Facebook's plan to make the entire web social is dependent upon drawing together information from many sources.

At the Facebook F8 conference (winding up as I write) CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented the keynote where he was reported:

The bigger announcement was what Facebook calls the 'Open Graph,' and how Facebook plans to connect disparate corners of the Web that other social sites are building. "Yelp is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to small businesses. Pandora is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to music," Zuckerberg said.  "If we can take these separate maps of the graph and pull them all together, then we can create a Web that's smarter, more social, more personalized, and more semantically aware."

"These connections aren't just happening on Facebook, they're happening all over the Web, and today with the Open Graph we're bringing all these things together," Zuckerberg said.

Would Palm's phone platform fit into this scenario?