One of the latest things Facebook has
announced is the Facebook Home. It has
been designed to bring Facebook front and center on an Android mobile. This
Home screen utility carries features that will enable you to stay in touch with
friends and family more easily. The new Facebook Home will entirely change the
way one interacts with Facebook as it brings full screen photos, notifications
and status updates directly to the home screen. Facebook Home will be available
to U.S. Android Facebook users from April 12th; and will roll out to
international users soon after. As of now, this feature would be available only
for handsets running Android versions Jelly Bean and Ice Cream Sandwich.
Facebook intends to launch updates on a
monthly basis, and these will add to the functionality and utility of Facebook
Home. A tablet version is also slated to
be launched very soon. Facebook has
decided to stick with Android as it offers more in terms of customization to the
end-user.
How
to get the app initially?
If you are using the current Facebook
application in its latest version and you have also downloaded Facebook
messenger for your smartphone, then you will be able to get the new Home app
directly to your phone. You will be notified through a banner update that you
can download the new app from the Google Play store.
Cover
Feed and full screen stories:
Facebook Home is going to change your
traditional home page on your Android device. It will be showing stories and
feeds from your friends and family directly on the home screen and you can
interact with these feeds also without having to switch to a different menu. All the feeds and stories would be shown to
you in full screen mode and you would be able to switch between stories by
scrolling left and right on the home screen. A much-touted feature is the
ability to show real-time notifications from your friends’ feeds on the home
screen, thereby giving you the ability to interact with the notification.
Chat
Heads:
You would get a pop up whenever someone
will message you over Facebook, and you will see that person’s face as an icon,
and you can start a conversation without having to launch Messenger. Chat
header feature will store chats so that you can continue from where you left
off in a conversation. The notification system is also going to change a little
that will allow you to check through different notifications at the same time. Chat
header will allow you to move between various Facebook message threads and you
can have simultaneous chats with friends using this feature.
Bringing
things together:
Mark Zuckerberg, while he was announcing Facebook Home, said that “Today we’re
going to finally talk about Facebook Phone, more accurately; we’re
going to talk about how you can turn your phone into a Facebook Phone”. His
intentions are to bring all the things under one platform and that is Facebook
Home. He added that users spend more than 20% of their time using social networking,
and it only makes sense to offer them a solution that makes it easier for them
to share and see what others are sharing. This is the main onus behind Facebook
Home. It serves to ease the way you interact with Facebook, and offers a lot of
features that allow you to get the most out of Facebook.
Partners:
HTC and AT&T are the first organizations
that will introduce the handsets entertaining Facebook Home. ‘HTC First’ is the
handset that will carry Facebook Home built-in. Other partners of Facebook in
bringing this app to market are Samsung, Orange, EE, Sony, ZTE, Alcatel, Huawei
and Lenovo. Facebook Home will make your social life easier, and it also aims
to ingratiate more and more features in the future as it looks to the user community
to glean what sort of utility they are looking for.
Conclusion
It is evident that Facebook is trying to
make things easier for users to access the features it has through Facebook Home.
With more than a billion users, the social networking site is clearly miles
ahead of everyone else, and is looking to diversify its offerings by launching
offerings like Facebook Home. While the idea behind Home makes sense, only the
real-world scenarios would tell us whether it is something that will make a
difference to most users.
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