Some time after the Big Bang when the raw chunk of rock that would become Earth was just starting to cool, the first rumors of a Facebook-branded phone started to crop up. They’ve been with us ever since, going away and returning like so many Matthew Perry sitcoms.

They re-appear today as The New York Times’ Nick Bilton reports that Big Face has hired half a dozen Apple employees who worked on the iPhone and at least one who worked on the iPad. The plan is to launch something next year.

From the Times:

This would be Facebook’s third effort at building a smartphone, said one person briefed on the plans and one who was recruited. In2010, the blog TechCrunch reported that Facebook was working on a smartphone. The project crumbled after the company realized the difficulties involved, according to people who had worked on it. The Web site AllThingsD reported last year that Facebook and HTC had entered a partnership to create a smartphone, code-named “Buffy,” which is still in the works.

Facebook wants to make money and making phones has certainly worked out well for Apple. Making hardware, however, is not exactly falling off a log. Could Facebook pull it off? Yeah, maybe, or it might be a complete fiasco.