T-Mobile's Bobsled lets you phone a friend on Facebook, and it's free and easy to use

As if you don't already spend enough time on Facebook, T-Mobile's making it tougher to click away from the social media website. The telco this week rolled out T-Mobile Bobsled for Facebook, a free app that allows you to make free, one-touch calling to Facebook friends from a personal computer and through the social platform's chat window.

With an estimated 500 million Facebook users worldwide, the app has enormous potential, and gives T-Mobile a seamless entry point into social media.

The app doesn't require your friends to have Bobsled; you can still call them to chat or leave them voice messages, but they'll need Bobsled, obviously, to call you.

Bobsled allows you to call Facebook friends anywhere, there are no global restrictions.

"T-Mobile's focus is to innovate to provide simple and affordable communications for customers, enabling people to stay connected wherever they are," said Brad Duea, SVP of T-Mobile USA. "Bobsled by T-Mobile takes our communications services innovation to a whole new dimension, bringing simple and cost-effective connections to more than half a billion people overnight, allowing people on Facebook to more easily connect and giving voice to social networking. Our new Bobsled brand will evolve in the coming months to provide even more ways for people to connect, no matter what platform, device or mobile provider they are using."

Aside from product visibility -- and 500 million potential views daily isn't a bad place to start -- T-Mobile seems to have no revenue stream built into Bobsled. The key may be more that it gets T-Mobile more social, immediately. And, it quickly positions T-Mobile as a provider of cloud-based communications services over the Internet.

As you'd expect, this initial iteration of Bobsled isn't close to the end game.

T-Mobile said it plans to evolve Bobsled to include video chat, to create the ability to place VoIP calls to mobile and landline U.S. numbers and to offer applications on smartphones and tablets across various mobile platforms, regardless of the carrier that powers such devices.

T-Mobile partnered with developer Vivox on Bobsled, whose VoiceEverywhere platform already has seen huge uptake with more than 45 million users eating up more than 3 billion voice chat minutes a month on social platforms and across the online gaming world.

Of course, Bobsled isn't the only VoIP available on Facebook (e.g. Vonnage, the erstwhile Click2Message, and the rumored Skype integration) but it has been one of the easiest to use, and with more options on the way T-Mobile could be a real winner.-Jim