Facebook, a cute little social networking site which is now turning into a formidable tech behemoth, has taken one more step towards
projecting its dominance. According to the rumors, the company is working on a secret project called 'Project Spartan', which will eventually lead to the creation of a mobile HTML5 app store. The new app store will essentially let the users bypass Apple App Store on their iDevices. Something tells us that Steve Jobs is not going to be happy about this.
Apple has its firm revenue sharing policy for all the apps sold via its App Store, which means that every time you download that Farmville app from Apple App Store, the Apple gets the cut out of the revenue and not Facebook. With its new store, Facebook is planning to take its Facebook credits to a new level and will use it as a payment system. Facebook store will work on Safari browser and thus will not be bound by Apple App Store T&Cs.
However, Spartan may have to work out a few kinks. Facebook credits has come out of Beta only recently and though there are fair number of Credits users, most of the Facebook users are going to be pretty skeptical about revealing their credit card information for buying credits. Facebook has a pretty spotty and iffy track record when it comes to respecting privacy of its users. Recent hack attacks are also not going to help.
And as far as setting a competing system is concerned, we can rest assured that Apple is not going to take it laying down. After all, Sparta would need Mobile Safari for its smooth operations and it is highly unlikely that Apple will let it happen. Whatever happens, but the battle between two titans is going to be one hell of an entertaining event. Please pass the popcorns.