The Facebook Home skin for your Android will be available for dwnloading on April 12, 2013 or you can buy the HTC First smartphone and get it now (Click Image To View The Facebook Home page)
The Facebook Phone is finally here. It’s not a phone at all, but a free, downloadable skin called "Home" that gives existing Android phones a total Facebook makeover, transforming both lock and home screens into immersive, edge-to-edge slideshows of photos and status updates.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's co-founder and chief executive speaks at the launch of Facebook Home at the unveiling at Facebook's HQ in Menlo Park, California on April 4, 2013 (Click Image To Enlarge)
Home will also come pre-loaded on the HTC First, which will be $99 from AT&T. It is, of course, a huge power play by Facebook. But it’s also a genuinely exciting new vision for mobile design. Here are three places where it’s charting new territory.
Home isn’t about apps. It’s about people. That was the refrain for the day, and it’s something that’s very much evident in its design. The most immediate transformation comes in the form of a new lock and home screen that continually rotate through Facebook updates, presenting them as flashy, full-screen slides. Weather forecast? Stock quotes? Those old stand-bys are nowhere to be found, getting the boot in favor of one thing: your friends.
The other big feature is a new messaging system called Chat Heads, which keeps conversations on top of your screen, no matter what app you’re using, in the form of small circular avatars. It’s a new way of thinking about messaging--not as an app but as a layer on top of everything you do.
The Home lock screen shows incoming messages and e-mails against a backdrop of full-screen status updates. On the right is the built-in app launcher. (Click Image To Enlarge)
Connecting, be it passively through the new lock screen or actively through the new messaging system, is what Home is about. Connecting with your friends--and with Facebook. The new experience reduces the friction involved in using Facebook to a fantastic degree. What’s easier than tapping an app icon to open Facebook? Not having to tap anything at all. With Home, you no longer have to make the decision to use Facebook. You’re already using it.
A new messaging system puts texts and FB messages as a layer on top of everything you do. Chat Head avatar (left) hangs out on top of Instagram. The UI (right) for quickly managing conversation threads. Avatars can be rearranged or hidden with a swipe. (Click Image To Enlarge)
But it might not feel like you’re using it, and that’s key. One noteworthy thing about Home is the name. When Zuckerberg talked about it today, he didn’t call it Facebook Home. It was just "Home." And that signals something that’s evident throughout the design: Facebook, as a platform, taking a backseat to the content it carries. As another presenter today boasted, there’s "no chrome, no logo." The home screen doesn’t show your Facebook feed, as some predicted. That’s too Facebook-y. It blows status updates up and shows them one at a time. It looks nothing like any other version of Facebook we’ve ever seen. The words "Facebook" are nowhere in sight.
Friends fill the screen. As soon as you turn on your phone or press the home button, you see a stream of posts from News Feed. Cover feed puts the spotlight on whatever your friends are sharing now -- photos, status updates, links and more. (Click Image To Enlarge)
And that’s smart.
Get notifications where you need them. Notifications about calls, events, Facebook updates and other apps appear on your home screen and stick around until you need them.¹ Profile pictures and app icons make it easy to see what’s what. Tap the stuff you’re into, swipe away the stuff you’re not. (Click Image To Enlarge)
But from a user experience standpoint, perhaps the most significant thing about Home is simply the way it thinks beyond the "app" in a broader sense. It’s something Zuckerberg harped on continually: moving beyond apps. And that’s a big departure.
Keep chatting, even when you’re using other apps. All your conversations from one spot. Chat from anywhere on your phone. (Click Image To Enlarge)
With Home, you can still get to all your old apps through a built-in launcher, sure, but they’re put in a little drawer like so many toys. Apps made smartphones like Swiss army knives. The whole idea of Home is to remake the smartphone user experience around its most important function: connecting us with other people. As Zuckerberg said, Home turns your smartphone into a "a great, simple social device."
The App Launcher accesses your Facebook account, Instagram and other apps and other essentials from one place. Choose what goes where. Drag your picture wherever you want to go. (Click Image To Enlarge)
The idea of mobile apps as discrete, cordoned-off experiences is something Apple entrenched with the iPhone very early on. Build whatever you want on your own rectangular plots, Apple told developers, but this phone is ours, and we’re the ones responsible for how it looks, feels, and functions.
Google never put those restrictions on Android, and now Facebook is moving in to exploit that in a big way. The result is something entirely different from the apps we’ve come to know--something that reaches far wider and is integrated far deeper. We don’t even really have a word for it. It’s not an OS. It’s not an app. For most users, it will just become what their phone is. And while that is in many ways a scary prospect, it does offer some interesting possibilities.
When you move beyond the app, you can do things apps can’t do. Home shows us messaging and communicating in ways we haven’t seen before--and, frankly, in ways that are much more relevant. Mobile messaging is no longer an asynchronous thing, as it was back in the days of 160-character texting. It’s more like chat, and Chat Heads, which doesn’t get knocked to the background when you’re using another app, reflects that reality. And it works in a way a simple text message appnever could.
During the event, Zuckerberg mentioned Android’s wide reach and how, for many people around the world, the smartphone represented their first real computing experience. And in a sense, Home is a bid to transform that experience--to move it away from the app paradigm that Google and Apple have put forward in recent years to something based on connecting and communicating, with Facebook conveniently facilitating it all.
But from one perspective, today’s event not only offered a peek beyond apps, but beyond smartphones too. It showed how the app model might not make sense on devices like Google Glass, where we won’t have the luxury of screens to tap at.
To succeed, that next generation of devices will have to be far more fluid and flexible, in terms of bringing in data and content from a variety of sources and giving us simple tools for digesting and sharing it. That may very well require a more holistic approach to design--a single driving vision that assimilates functions and features into one cohesive experience. Facebook Home is a glimpse of what that next step might look like.
COMMENTARY: In 2012, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg eliminated any rumors that the social network would introduce its own smartphone. This is obviously a smart and bold move, because if enough phone set manufacturer's sign-on to permit preloading of the Home skin app, this essentially gives Facebook a form of "ownership" of that phone. Apps are all fighting for the attention of the consumer, and having an app that loads up first, before any other app, is a distinct advantage. So what does Facebook Home offer brand marketer's?
- More Time On Facebook - Facebook introduced the "home" concept to its desktop version in 2006 with News Feed, a way to make the home page "feel like home." Rather than clicking to see updates and photos, it came to us. According to Zuckerberg, frequency and time spent skyrocketed. Fans started consuming almost twice as much content overnight. If Facebook Home has a similar impact then marketers will have more ways to get the attention of their target market. Cover feed will eventually allow ads but for now the focus will be on building the audience.
- Tap Users In Developing Countries - Facebook has one billion users today. The next billion will come from developing countries, but they aren't spending $500 on a new smartphone. Facebook's free download and introductory $99 handset (through its partnership with HTC) opens this market up. For marketers this means access to more people in more countries.
- More Personal Data Captured - With this move, Facebook aims to join the data capture ranks of Apple and Google with their iPhone and Android devices. With more data flowing through Facebook's app -- including SMS texts, GPS-tracked location, and possibly even phone usage -- marketers will be able to target mobile users with greater precision and accuracy. A featured item may be displayed as a user walks through a given store, for example.
- Privacy and Permission Marketing - Facebook will never sell personally identifiable information. If they did, users would leave and marketers would follow. But Facebook Home does open up the opportunity for brands to reach anonymous fans in their target market with greater accuracy. And in all forms of marketing, on all platforms, that means the global creepy trigger gets more sensitive. To hedge against this, marketers are increasingly moving toward permission marketing. Asking fans for permission to access their data and using it in transparent ways to serve personalized, relevant, anticipated messages -- as opposed to paid ads -- is a clear path toward increased sales, loyalty and retention. For more on Facebook Home and permission marketing, see this television interview with the author by the Business News Network (BNN), filmed hours after the Facebook Home launch.
Many phone carriers are pre-rolling ads before the home screen displays. I can clearly see a similar opportunity for pre-rolled ads appearing before Home loads up. Users are normally paying attention to their phone screen to make sure that apps load. A pre-rolled ad could easily become part of the loading process and accepted as normal. The number of daily ad impressions just from booting up your phone will be at least 1 billion.
Courtesy of an artile dated April 4, 2013 appearing in Fast Company Design and an article dated April 5, 2013 appearing in The Huffington Post
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