Zuck: We need to collect even more information about our customers like their heart rate, body temperature, skin resistivity, perspiration coefficient, and all ambient sound and light around them. Ideally with a highly-accurate timestamp and fine-grained location so we can correlate their interactions with other customers even better than we can with smartphones.
I also see some technical problems. The watch can be detached from the frame on the wrist. It does not seem easy to design a robust and small mechanism for this. Also it has to deal with sweat and dirt.
I’d be a bit sceptical about this news item. The project seems to be in a real early stage and could even be shelved before it sees the day.
However, if it has to find its way out of Facebook’s garage and succeed; it will have to be an incredible feat of engineering to meet customer expectations. If the product decisions are driven purely from a data collection point of view, the success rate will be real low.
If it's at the stage where they're talking to partners, and it's expected to ship in less than a year, I'd argue that those are pretty clear indications that this isn't a skunkworks project that will be shelved.
FB Engineers: Here's an idea...