When Microsoft as well as Facebook announced that they were partnering to integrate Facebook as well as Bing for social network–powered search, it reliable something I suspicion Monday: Windows Phone 7 is a real Facebook phone.

I don’t know either Facebook has a tip group operative upon a phone where they control a OS. But a company don’t need a single. It’s already deeply integrated into Android as well as iOS. Now with the Microsoft partnership, it’s tied to a most socially optimized smartphone ever brought to the marketplace.

“This is, I think, a single of a many exciting partnerships we’ve finished upon the platform so distant,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pronounced during the Bing announcement Wednesday. “Our perspective is which over a subsequent five years you design which almost every attention is going to be disrupted by someone building the good product that’s low in whatever area which industry is, and is intensely socially integrated.”

The initial Windows Phone 7 handsets have been due in stores November. The OS is Microsoft’s finish do-over upon mobile, after the predecessor Windows Mobile tight in recognition as well as market share in a wake of some-more consumer-savvy handsets such as Apple’s iPhone as well as Google’s Android-powered smartphones.

Every aspect of Windows Phone 7 is geared to social networks: phone, contacts, gaming, photos, even Office. Focusing the phone around Hubs doesn’t only mean which internal client apps as well as cloud apps have been grouped subsequent to any other. It equates to that a local client as well as cloud work together.

Microsoft tried to explicitly setup the social networking phone featuring Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and MySpace with the Kin. The Kin unsuccessful as well as was killed by Microsoft, often since it wasn’t the full-featured smartphone (it was the flare of Windows Phone 7), but compulsory a smartphone’s interpretation devise.

The Kin’s cloud-backed amicable as well as pity components lived on in Windows Phone 7. They were always there. Only now, Flickr as well as MySpace have been nowhere to be found.

Even prior to the Bing announcement, Facebook was a celebrated part of a WP7 display. Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore summarized the scenario where users could take the print upon their phone that’s then uploaded to Facebook automatically, without even opening a Facebook app.

In a press release for WP7, Microsoft notes which “the customizable Start shade with Live Tiles provides real-time updates so you can keep tabs on a ultimate continue foresee, your the one preferred rope, the friend’s Facebook page as well as more, all with just a single glimpse” [emphasis combined.

That wasn’t an collision. The Facebook-Bing partnership was already function.

It’s a expect strategy that Zuckerberg summarized in his interview with Michael Arrington, where he explained why Facebook wasn’t building the own phone.

Zuckerberg usually made an brusque reference to WP7 in that interview: “If Windows Phone 7 takes off, afterwards I’m certain we’ll put resources on that.” But he added, with anxiety to their efforts with the iPhone as well as Android, “The subject is, what could you do if we additionally started hacking at the deeper level, as well as which is the lot of a things which we’re thinking about.”

In order to do which, Zuckerberg explained, you need to find the company which was peaceful to soak up amicable networking from the operating system up — not just adding a layer upon top of it was already you do, but creation that the concentration of a device and the services.

At least a single of those companies is Microsoft.

“We proposed meditative what would amicable search look like, and you started looking around for partners,” Zuckerberg said. “Microsoft really is a loser here and they really have been incentivized to try brand-new things.”

He was articulate about search, though he may as good have been talking about phones.

Microsoft may be a loser in poke as well as phones, but it’s essentially been ahead of a curve in conditions of incorporating amicable layers into the products. The Zune had strain as well as print pity between inclination over Wi-Fi prior to a iPhone was even voiced.

But that was the sealed network, limited to only Zune-to-Zune, as well as later Zune-to-Xbox. In order to get outside of itself, Microsoft partnered with Facebook early upon — it still owns partial of a association — as well as Facebook helped figure Microsoft’s social plan.

Microsoft has been quietly office building the amicable network but anybody essentially seeing. Windows Live, Office Live, Xbox Live are all social networks where users work, share files as well as speak about media together. You use the same temperament opposite all of those services on every Microsoft device.

Facebook is already embedded in all of them: It’s built into Messenger, Hotmail as well as Outlook, as well as it’s what powers partial of the social dimension of Xbox Live. And Bing is already embedded in Facebook, in the form of maps as well as poke formula.

Now Facebook’s information is embedded in Bing poke. And poke is a single of just 3 buttons upon each WP7 phone.

Consequently, Facebook’s partnership with Bing isn’t only about Google> It isn’t just about “Like” formula showing up when you poke in the web browser upon your PERSONAL COMPUTER.

It’s about incorporating a social layer into media upon each device in your domicile, from your phone to your set-top box. It’s about creation those inclination smarter in how they promulgate with each other and from a single height to an additional.

That’s what stood out to me many during a Windows Phone 7 launch eventuality. The Office people demonstrated how to make use of Windows Live to tide the PowerPoint display from a Windows PC to the Mac. The Xbox people were display how to chat about the Netflix film with your Facebook friends upon Xbox live. The hardware people were showing off the wide-angle HD webcam which will let family groups chat with families from their vital bedrooms. Deep formation of inclination, media and services — using the cloud to energy person-to-person communication by voice, images as well as text.

If you think about Apple’s try with Ping to bring a amicable layer to iTunes (which has been criticized, in partial, since Apple didn’t partner up with Facebook), Sony’s thought of the multitasking radio set or Twitter’s plays to get on a television shade with Google TV, it’s transparent that that’s where we’re streamer.

The usually places where Microsoft as well as Facebook have been “underdogs” have been poke as well as smartphones. When it comes to amicable networking as well as intelligent partnering with alternative companies — including any alternative — a dual giants are approach forward of a margin.