Facebook held its developers conference, known as F8 yesterday, and the company delivered a storm of new ideas to the software writing public. According to the general trend of the features announced on Wednesday, Facebook is looking to take over your smartphone. That may spell trouble for Google, but it could be good for users.

Facebook may be the world’s most popular social network, but that’s simply not enough when you’re in competition with the likes of Google and Apple. The company needs to be more adventurous and ambitious, unless it wants to be led off into the woods and put down like so many rigid tech giants before it.

Facebook Unveils Mobile Features

Mark Zuckerberg, and other Facebook executives, unveiled a “Like” button for mobile apps, a way to link applications together so that they don’t need to be closed and opened to switch between them, and the ability to log into third part applications anonymously. These three features may mean little to users, but they should mean a lot to those who know how the web works.

Facebook is looking to collect masses of information about the way people use their smartphones. The company is creating a mobile pp curation system, leveraging its “Like” brand, and a system for app makers to share certain kinds of information between them, through the deep linking feature. This may just be the start for Facebook as the company tries to achieve on mobile what it never could on the web.

Facebook Goes Mobile

The idea of Facebook invading your phone may not be for everyone, but that day appears to be coming. The company is forced to follow its users in order to continue serving them. Those users have moved wholeheartedly into mobile devices. Facebook is doing the same thing, while appreciating the changes in the way people use its platform on their smartphones.

It’s not good enough to just be another player, Facebook wants to be the backbone of a web of mobile applications. It wants to form the way that mobile applications talk to each other and influence the way people choose which applications to install. If it can manage that, Facebook will be in control of a good chunk of the smart phone world, and phone users may not even notice.

These ideas are still forming, and Facebook is going to face a wall of competition. Google is, and always has been, gunning to become the center of mobile operations. The moves at the F8 conference are likely to rouse that company to action. Facebook may want control of mobile, but it’s not the only one, and the company needs to be prepared to battle for the privilege.