• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, November 22, 2011

Fueling the industry’s favorite pet rumor, reports have surfaced that Facebook is finally getting its own smartphone.   

“After years of considering how to best get into the phone business, Facebook has tapped Taiwanese cellphone maker HTC to build a smartphone that has the social network integrated at the core of its being,” writes AllThingsD.

Code-named “Buffy” after the television vampire slayer, the phone is expected to run on a modified version of Android, which Facebook has reportedly tweaked heavily to deeply integrate its services, as well as to support HTML5 as a platform for applications. 

After asking for credit for breaking the same story over year ago, ex-TechCrunch editor MG Siegler explains: “Here’s all you need to know though: Facebook is building a phone because Facebook has to build a phone … The fact of the matter is that mobile is the future of computing and it’s currently controlled by two gate masters: Apple and Google.”

A spokesman for Facebook would not comment on the phone, but told The Wall Street Journal: “Our mobile strategy is simple: We think every mobile device is better if it is deeply social. We’re working across the entire mobile industry; with operators, hardware manufacturers, OS providers, and application developers to bring powerful social experiences to more people around the world.”

Still, as Mashable notes: “Buffy will be far from the first Facebook phone. Earlier this year, INQ Mobile released two phones, the Cloud Touch and Cloud Q that put the service front and center. Then HTC took it a step further with the Status, which came to the U.S. on AT&T this summer and featured a prominent dedicated Facebook button. Finally, Facebook released an app designed specifically for the iPad in October.”

New or not, “The Facebook phone was imminent, considering the fact that Apple baked Twitter into iOS 5, at which point it became even more clear that there was never going to be Facebook integration into iOS 5,” reasons ReadWriteWeb.