TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

David Winer thinks it not only makes sense for Facebook to make their own phone, but it’s incredibly obvious:

They have a shot at creating the mobile device my mother would love. And my mother has an iPhone, and it’s really hard to use when you look at it through her eyes. Seriously.

If you took the Facebook app for the iPhone and pulled it out through its umbilical cord and made it the operating environment instead of just an app, you’d have an awesomely simple mobile device. Just add an icon for Voice and you’re good to go.

There’s two reasons I can think of for Facebook to build their own phone: (1) because they feel threatened by the mobile platforms Apple and Google are building, and (2) to really nail the user experience and make Facebook front-and-center on users’ devices so they completely adopt Facebook. These reasons may be interconnected.

For the first reason, Facebook could see Android and iOS as a threat because on these platforms, Facebook is just another application, and mobile is what’s really important to Facebook. There’s no advantage for them over Twitter or Foursquare on these platforms, and so they could be irrelevant tomorrow. They have network effects helping them, but it’s not very reassuring—all users have to do to stop using them is delete their application, and Apple or Google could build their own social services and fully integrate them into their devices.

The second reason, then, is an extension of the first. Maybe Facebook believes they can try to force those platforms to integrate their services.

Facebook depends on users using their service for pretty much everything you and your social network are doing—discussing things between each other, what you’ve eaten, watched on TV, places you’ve went, et cetera—so they want to push users to use it as much as possible. A Facebook phone, where Facebook’s status updates and check-ins have a special status as compared to Twitter or Foursquare’s services, would certainly help.

There’s a lot of overhead involved in it. Why not just work with other companies to make Facebook the primary social service on their phones? After all, Facebook is trying to be a connective layer between devices. Perhaps Facebook thinks making their own phone is worth the cost because if it’s successful, it could encourage other phone companies to more deeply integrate Facebook into their devices. At that point, Facebook would be the main social layer we all rely on, because it’s embedded in our mobile devices, and they would win.