On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg told reporters in a visit to Facebook Seattle the company plans to “launch something awesome” next week, according to a Reuters report published Thursday. The new product was developed at Facebook’s Seattle office, he said. Facebook Seattle, which opened in March and currently has around 40 employees, is the company’s only engineering outfit outside of its Silicon Valley headquarters.

As of press time, Facebook’s public relations team has not responded to GigaOM’s request for comment on the impending launch.

The new product could well be an iPad app, something that has been notably absent from Facebook’s portfolio for some time now. According to reports published earlier this month, Facebook has been readying an iPad app for over a year and was in the final stages of testing as of mid-June. Meanwhile, the company is also understood to be building an HTML5-based platform to serve a mobile version of its site through the web, rather than through a native app interface.

One thing is certain: Between all the IPOs, blockbuster fundraising events, and major product launches, it has been a very busy summer for the tech industry. And with Facebook apparently planning to kick off July in “awesome” fashion, it looks like 2011 may not have one of those traditional summer slumps at all.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• A Media Tablet Forecast, 2011 – 2015
• The Future of Workplaces
• Post-IPO strategies for LinkedIn

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Open Salon claims that an ad appearing in the free version of the app Twitterfon is the first place this new iPhone feature was discovered. However, the ad in question is nowhere to be found at press time and hasn’t been confirmed.

iTunes TV ad

(Credit: Open Salon)

According to the report, the ad supposedly led to a place that pointed to some movie and TV show listings. The listings were broken down by genre, and although titles were listed, none would work when accessed.

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Originally posted at iPhone Atlas