To echo a complaint that is common when designers show off prototypes/imagined-redesigns...what does all this look like when your friends aren't as attractive/good at photography? I'm talking about the Cover Feed function. In the life stage I am now, I'd say that my Facebook Phone would be showing random baby photos 80% of the time, food photos 10% of the time.<p>I'm also curious how that feature interacts with what I've observed to be normal FB usage. When I want to post a status, I post a status. When I post photos, it's usually as a batch, not many with captions. I think that's how most people do instagrams too.<p>So, if you have a home screen feed focused on your newsfeed...how will statuses be "attractive" looking? Using the user's default cover image? But those are extremely horizontal. The only newsfeed entities that contribute beautiful photos with substantial text that are in my newsfeed are companies and brands (OK, and George Takei).
I take issue with the problem statement: <i>"today, phones are built around tasks and apps. To see what's happening with your friends, you pull out your phone and navigate through a series of separate apps."</i><p>Firstly, the value to me in owning a smartphone and paying the charges associated with it is ultimately task orientated - from running my business, to getting driving directions, to wanting to play a specific genre of music at the gym. That's actually where the <i>value</i> is in my phone. Maybe I don't fit the demographic, but I don't want those to become second-class citizens over friend communications.<p>Secondly, it's very hollow to define the problem as <i>'your friend's activities are spread across multiple apps'</i> when their solution only promotes Facebook activity to the fore.<p>My FB friend's activity is currently only contained in one app - the FB app. Their solution only removes the checking of multiple apps because those other apps (non-FB social networks, IM networks, etc) are going to be relegated into obscurity and no longer top of mind.<p>How's that ultimately helpful to my <i>real, technology agnostic,</i> friendships?
Sometimes, I hate being such a cynical person.<p>I see what appears to be a fine product, which adds a lot of desirable features for communication -- chat heads look especially nice -- but all I can really wonder is what else Facebook might be mining out of my phone usage that the regular Facebook App doesn't do already. Maybe they want to take over SMS messaging on the phone completely and route it through Facebook (centralized chat, it's not even unreasonable), or perhaps automatically upload everything and let you filter expoosed data after the fact (which is too late to trust that it's ever gone). When it comes pre-installed on the phone, they don't even have to ask for permission for everything.
Ok so now they can log every interaction you do on your phone. Look out for new permissions that you need to change the defaults to, or else your friends will see updates such as "Mongol just dialed his friend John". "Mongol is playing Wordfeud". "Mongol has an appointment with his dentist".
Thanks for all the great feedback. It's awesome to see how much everyone likes the site.<p>I was the designer and Nick Kwiatek (<a href="http://nkwiatek.com" rel="nofollow">http://nkwiatek.com</a>) built it. Elisabeth Carr wrote the content, Peter Jordan and Nate Salciccioli made the videos. It was definitely a team effort and feels great to be able to share it with everyone.
I think were all missing the point here, there's now a "facebook phone". For a certain demographic facebook is the most important thing on their phone. It doesn't really matter if home is a huge inovation or not, it only needs to be slightly better then iOS and Android for using facebook and this demo will adopt it.<p>Facebook is opening up a new market for themselves and with a phone for $99 its very easy for someone to say "mommy I want the facebook phone" and get it.<p>Soon "facebook phone" will start appearing alongside "iphone", "droid", and "windows phone" as common vernacular. By partnering with att & htc and building on top of android they have now gained access into the cell phone industry with no investment in hardware, cell towers or in creating a new OS, just redesigning a home screen.<p>Theres a huge potential upside with very little risk involved. Its a good move on facebooks part.
I think what Facebook are going for here makes a lot of sense.<p>The home screen at the moment is a fork in the road with the choice of dozens of different app paths to take. What they're planning on doing is removing the extra step needed to start interacting with the content.<p>It's similar to how they changed the original facebook app. Instead of starting by presenting all the options of which part of facebook you wanted to go to (profile/photos/newsfeed/messages etc.) it instead went straight into the news feed.<p>This presumably could work just as well with the whole phone. Although my concern is that facebook is only a small subset of my sources of interesting information on mobile. It seems highly limiting for it to only show facebook app content. Maybe there's a possible opportunity for a competing, open 'home screen' app to bring it all in.
I think the biggest thing for me is that my smartphone has always been a "private" thing for me, a place where I can choose to interact with people, or spend hours playing Angry Birds.<p>With this phone, I'm forced into an environment where I feel like I need to be social all the time, and I feel that might wear on a lot of people.
"From the moment you turn it on, you see a steady stream of friends’ posts and photos."<p>Sounds like a self-flagellation device for masochists.<p>"Upfront notifications and quick access to your essentials mean you’ll never miss a moment."<p>Except for most of what's important, which you will miss unless you put that phone down.<p>"And you can keep chatting with friends, even when you’re using other apps."<p>Please kill me.<p>On the page design: I'm not as impressed as many of the commenters here. It's nonresponsive and requires horizontal scrolling.
I think this is going to suck. And I think that because Facebook apparently doesn't have any engineers who do "plumbing" - uninteresting work that's necessary.<p>The core Facebook app still has a software menu button pop up, because they're not targeting a remotely recent build of Android. There is not a single jellybean-style rich notification anywhere to be found. The MediaUploadService doesn't stop itself if media upload is turned off, and it shouldn't even be on because android 4.x broadcasts an intent when a picture is taken anyway.<p>As we saw in a post about a month ago, monkey patching dalvik is sexy and interesting to work on - the fact that their codebase is so convoluted that they have to is a symptom of sloppy engineering.
Facebook is so obsessed about telling me what my friends do, when i meet them, whats there to talk about? I think we are getting to a point where the digital social networks are ruining the actual social networks; the actual social network is just diluted.
Just my opinion.
Just looked at all the videos. I wanted to like this but I'm really unimpressed. I don't understand why anyone would install this.<p>All my friends seem to be using Facebook less and less and this seems to be another way to lock me into Facebook's ecosystem. While they could easily allow you to contact your friends in all the ways which you normally communicate with them - SMS, Email, Phone, the only thing they integrated in was Facebook messages.<p>By making this, they are basically saying that people want something in their hand which provides them random information they can swipe to. People want this random info soo sooo much, they we've made it the home screen + doing anything in apps is the exception.
In its present form, where I risk my SoHo friends' strip poker party greeting the workplace every time I whip out my phone, Home targets Facebook'a beachhead of college students.<p>Adding geographic and temporal modality, e.g. enabling Home <i>if</i> I am not at the office <i>and</i> it is not between 9AM and 6PM on a weekday, would broaden its appeal.
The greatest benefit of a facebook phone to me has nothing to do with photos, status updates, etc (although I am likely in the minority). Facebook, to me, has become an address book of all of my friends, with contact information that updates itself when it changes.<p>If facebook replaced my address book with my facebook friends list, and texting and calling to them "just worked", hopefully using facebook-to-facebook over Wifi when available, it would be a great phone.
Looks like their pre-order page (<a href="http://www.att.com/facebookhome" rel="nofollow">http://www.att.com/facebookhome</a>) is 404ing.<p>On topic - I personally wouldn't use this. Facebook belongs as an app. More integration is (almost) always nice, but I really don't need a phone dedicated to the social network - I'd prefer to move farther away from it.
I could not help but notice one of their Cover feed screenshots showing an advert -- <a href="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v2/yY/r/fNNR8sV8Y3W.png" rel="nofollow">http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v2/yY/r/fNNR8sV8Y3W.png</a> .<p>OK, this one I think I get. Why have full-screen standby ads only on Kindle?
What new privacy holes will this introduce? I wonder if the facebook home will be constantly monitoring your location, recording app usage, grabbing your text messages, etc. Basically, are you surrendering the rest of your phone data to facebook?
Why don't they fix Facebook on android before releasing a new product? It frequently "shooooops" for me - crashes, lags, hogs resources, and otherwise does unexpected things.<p>I'm very wary to install any software from Facebook on Android.
Anyone notice how the main video on that page is almost exclusively women using the app? Guess that's linking in to the idea others have quoted here about the attractiveness factor of the photos in question.
Given that Facebook listed "Mobile" as a major risk to their future [1], this seems like a proportionate response. It seems like every tech giant wants the be at the top of the heap, to control software that is as close to the user as possible. In this case Google Glass looks pretty smart, you can't get any closer than a quarter inch away from my eyeball.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/05/09/facebook-tweak-s-1-adds-language-on-risks-in-growth-in-mobile-useage/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/05/09/facebook-t...</a>
Everyone in that video seems to be having fun. Must be good.<p>The design of the production page is nice though. The video mast is kind of what I've been waiting for for a long time. It's nicely implemented.
I have my doubts about the launcher and would much rather have Twitter take on the endeavor given I derive much more utility from its network (highlighting stories on my Twitter feed seem a lot more relevant in practice when it comes to things I care about having on my phone's lock screen), but Facebook did one hell of a job with this product landing page. Props to their design team. (Ah! The video header! It's so pretty! And not a single man in sight!)
I like Android intents and all, but I think Facebook is misguided if their plan is to release a new version of Home every month. The intent preference is only remembered for the same version of the app... that means if they choose to update the version the user will be asked if they want to launch the intent with Facebook Home again ("Just Once" / "Always").
Ok here's my two cents.<p>-It does look great. But I'm also curious as to what will happen if my friends are not good photographers. How about when they post pictures of what they have eaten?<p>-I most likely take my phone out of my pocket more than a hundred times each day, they got that part right. Sometimes I just use the phone screen to check the date and time. Sometimes to check if someone has called me or texted me/mailed me. If I'm the only one who checks his phone's screen in order to learn the time, then this is probably a moot point. If not, it's going to be annoying.<p>-It's all good and dandy to be connected to my friends all the time but I use my phone for what it was meant for, phoning other people. It's very rare that I take my phone out of my pocket to check up on friends through social media. If I want to check up on people, I call them. If I want to do it over facebook or similar, I use the apps.<p>-Ads. It's most likely get ugly and annoying, fast.
A variant of this idea was implemented by Motorola on some of their phones (which I used for a few weeks before returning it). I forget what it was called ...motoblur? The concept was pretty neat but it drained battery like nothing else. I wonder what the battery implications of Home are.
Does this remind anyone else of the ill conceived Motorola Rokr? <a href="http://img.iguor.com/2012/11/112752-apple-ceo-jobs-introduces-rokr-a-mobile-phone-with-itunes-during-event.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://img.iguor.com/2012/11/112752-apple-ceo-jobs-introduce...</a>
Facebook, like Google, has the goal of getting users to use their service more - as they are an advertising platform. Google Glass means people will search more - when they're away from the computer. Google investing in better internet means people will have quicker connections, which means they'll again means they'll be searching more.<p>Here, by increasing the likelihood people are engaged/interested in Facebook status events, Facebook will drive users back to their core platform, whether it's their core app or the desktop version - where they will, indeed, get more impressions for their advertisers. I doubt they are dumb enough, though, to actually do this through the home screen of our phones.
I'd like to point out that this is the first Android phone which didn't emphasize the logos and manufacture. Most Androids have a horrible cluttered physical design, partly because manufactures slap their logo right on the front.
Regardless about how you feel about the actual functionality here, as an entrepreneur you have to be impressed with Facebook's ability to continually ratchet up engagement year after year after year.
This falls into what I'd categorize as "solving the easy problems". It's something that companies do all the time. And sometimes it's worthwhile, but often it means that a company doesn't understand the business it's in very well and doesn't have a clue how to innovate.<p>Personally I believe that there is a huge amount of room for improvement and innovation in social, and when I see a company like facebook merely working on the "make it prettier and easier" aspect I can't help but wonder how long until a disruptor wrecks their world.
I think Facebook home won't be disruptive. There is so much more that goes into marketing and selling consumer products.<p>Home is a good win-win deal for facebook and HTC. Facebook can collect valuable social data from mobile devices and optimize ad delivery for users of that phone. HTC has the ability to use Home as a way to differentiate its phone in a very crowded market where the average consumer sees little differentiation between different smart phones outside of the iphone.
It turns your Android phone into Facebook. I'm amused by the App Launcher description: "Get right to Facebook, Instagram and other essentials". Because the only reason I use technology for social media things...<p>But to be fair there might be a certain demographic for which this makes sense. And in many ways it's a lot like what Microsoft is trying to do with Windows Phone (but I don't know how successful that is).<p>The product seems pretty cool even though I'd never use it.
The site says $99, however, upon clicking preorder, we see it costs $450 without a contract. AT&T of course says, "*Requires 2-yr contract with qualifying voice and data plans. Activation fee applies." So this cool little idea just got a whole lot more expensive.<p>I say wait for the rom to leak, and then dual boot it on a new Nexus 4.<p>UPDATE: Sorry, I misread, this is just an overlay. Still though, the point still stands.
I wouldn't give >1% of my battery power to an app like this, especially coming from Facebook. Back when I used the Facebook app and Facebook it drained too much of the battery.<p>Now if feedly launches something like this, where the photos and content come from RSS feeds, you can sign me up for beta testing. You could take over and kill Chameleon, Apex, Go, and Trebuchet easily.
I think it really is bad news for Apple... if more such stuff starts coming exclusively on Android, then it is bad for Apple. And very good for Google. (posting this to get some insight, not to initiate ugly debate among Apple/Google fan-boys)
What a landing page. Almost makes me want to start using Facebook again. Now, this is the step before Facebook forks android, and builds their own apps store. And then they build their own signature phone, then a tablet, and so on...
A few of my own thoughts and observations. Content (from your friends that you see) really is king. <a href="http://bit.ly/10CinIx" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/10CinIx</a>
Is anyone here aware of a "chat heads" like chat UI for desktop computing? Seems like there is nothing about the idea that makes it only a good design on mobile platforms.
Lot of False Likes will happen - due to low quality phones..double tap means a like.. it will be the biggest concern for mobile users with facebook home installed
Home? Home is where my heart is. So among other thing, that means it's where facebook isn't.<p>Ugly on the outside, even more ugly on the inside -- what's not to ignore, until you burn it down?