Watch the video to see how it was supposed to work.

The T-Mobile Bobsled voice over Internet service announced a little over a week ago which let Facebook users make calls on Facebook to each other. We clicked to try the service, but it doesn’t work today. Why? According to their Facebook page, T-Mobile has temporarily suspended the Bobsled service.

The message says:

We are voluntarily and temporarily suspending the Bobsled service as we work with our partners at Facebook to address their design questions, including working to ensure that the Bobsled experience is clearly differentiated and is not mistaken for a Facebook created property. We apologize to oru customers for this temporary disruption in service.

Did anyone try Bobsled when it was working? It appears that T-Mobile didn’t like how the service appeared to users. It didn’t show clearly that the service belongs to T-Mobile and that Facebook was not the one that created Bobsled service. Something like that … hope the two global conglomerates make up soon!

Facebook’s mobile strategy is different from most. Think mobile; think smartphone, right? But Facebook thinks ‘feature phones.’ More feature phones are used worldwide, not smart phones. 

“We want people to have a great mobile experience no matter what type of phone they carry,” comments Mark Heynen, mobile program manager at Facebook on their blog. “Smartphones have offered better features for sharing with friends but aren’t used by most people around the world.”

Even in the USA, in 2009, feature phones accounted for 83% of all mobile (cellular), and in Eqo CEO Bill Tam’s Bending the Needle audio podcast interview with Martyn Davies, he mentions that his voIP app works on feature and smart phones. Many of the world’s voIP applications only work on smart phones. Visit http://www.voipuser.org/btn/ to listen. (Eqo is based in Canada.)

What is a feature phone?  It’s low-end mobile phone that has less computing ability than a smartphone, but more capability than a “dumb phone”. Omar Shaikh, Techistan Team member, states about his own phone, a QMobile which cost him about $35 USD, “It’s a smart phone but not too smart.”

The phones tend to run applications based in Java ME or BREW. It has fewer advanced programming interfaces (APIs) and does not run native software that is specific to a smartphone platform.

Facebook’s choice to go after feature phone users fits into its growth goal to expand its user base to every area of Earth. Study SocialBakers’ Facebook statistics to see the highest growth areas are those where feature phone users far outweigh the number of smart phone users. See http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/.

“More people check and/or update Facebook via mobile phone than any other device, I think. At least that is how most of those in my Facebook network update, and I’ve got people in France, Ghana, Australia, USA, Japan, China, Canada, Mexico, and Pakistan in my network,” shares Kenneth Sharpsley, a member of Techistan’s Facebook page. “We are able to even receive phone calls on IP side or cellular side of the feature phones via SIP call forwarding. Some of us use MyDivert and others use Virtual Phone Line. Both of these have options to connect to Facebook. It’s not as cool as using a smart phone, but smart phones are too expensive considering the wages in the area that I live now.”

Facebook does have an application for feature phones. How cool is that?