Well it looks like Nokia may be partnering with Facebook in a fairly major way to allow placement of Facebook right onto the main menus of Nokia screens.  Pretty important stuff in terms of utility and branding.

Not just in terms of the kind of reach Nokia has in Europe (and beyond), but I think its a pretty wise move overall, and something that they’d do well with in terms of reaching deals with *other* phone (and carrier) companies.  Why is this?  Oh, nothing profound here other than the fact that a new generation of digital natives will be doing more and more with their cell phones, and less and less with old fashioned desk tops.

While the digital milieu is clearly different in North America (and in Canada, than say, the United States), if places like Japan are a harbinger of this kind of future, where cell phone novels are clearly the Next Big Thing (as a means to get discovered, cut a book deal, fame, fortune, and so on), creating partnerships to make your functionality available on the go is a good thing.

I have to admit that I don’t actually use Facebook much; however, when it was still fresh and new to me, there was an appeal about checking the mobile site via Blackberry — and in a very Twitterish kind of way, update my “what am I doing” portion as I go.

Sure there are issues about how a monetary partnership might affect Facebook’s bottom line, but I think that getting your brand onto cell phones — no matter how you do it, through important partnership deals to expand “distribution” — is forward thinking, and is clearly where the future is going.

Facebook’s in decent company, I suppose, as its hard to question Google’s own moves, as they are making a billion dollar play with the 700Mhz spectrum auction (complementing their push with Android, of course).