Zuckerberg: No Facebook Phone, Yet

The young chief executive, in an interview with Tech Crunch, said Facebook's growth will rely heavily on mobility and predicts that mobility will eclipse the web in its importance in coming years.

"Our role is to be a platform for making all of these apps more social, and it's kind of an extension of what we see happening on the web, with the exception of mobile, which I think will be even more important than the web in a few years -- maybe even sooner," Zuckerberg said. "The web is only at one and a half billion people whereas everyone is going to have a phone and all the phones are going to be smartphones. So our strategy is that we want to go wherever people are building apps so we can make all of those apps social if they want that."

Zuckerberg said that Facebook wants to be the "social layer for everything" whether on the web, mobile or other device. He called the approach a "breadth-first approach rather than a depth-first one."

And while mobility will be a driving force for Facebook and social networking as a whole, Zuckerberg said Facebook is not yet working on its own device or operating system offering, despite rumors that swirled last week that Facebook was developing a smartphone.

Zuckerberg said "...you can't just wake up one day and decide you want to do this stuff. Even building a whole operating system is, like years and years of work." Later, he added: "I mean, who knows, 10 years down the road, maybe we'll build our own operating system or something, but who knows. That is more history than we've had so far with the company, so it is really hard to predict that far out. But for now, I think everything is going to be shades of integration, rather than starting from the ground up and building a whole system"

As for a Facebook-branded smartphone or device, Zuckerberg said there could be "exploratory conversations" within Facebook about it, but "none of them have gotten to that level of detail."