Not too long ago, Facebook’s owner Mark Zuckerburg unveiled Facebook’s newest endeavour: Facebook Home. This feature, created to meet the demands of the over one billion users who use Facebook almost every day (with the majority of them now accessing this social media site through mobile devices and smartphones), has been built to further encourage a user’s interaction with other Facebook users on this already booming social network.
But is Facebook Home living up to what it’s promised? Though just released on April 12 2013, many users are already weighing in on this brand new feature.
What Is Facebook Home?
As Mark Zuckerburg said in an April 4, 2013 press conference, “Today, our phones are designed around apps, not people… we want to flip that around.” Facebook Home’s been created to help try to emphasize interaction with Facebook through people rather than through apps, and features a “Cover Feed”. This “Cover Feed” acts as a replacement for what Facebook users know as the “
A new “chat heads” system has also been incorporated into the new Facebook home which allows users to quickly and effortlessly contact and message one another from any app on their mobile device.Home” screen, and it posts up real time updates in a full-screen environment.
Some other features include:
- The ability to launch apps while still on Facebook
- A new replacement lock screen for Android phones that will display all notifications from Facebook, as well as other apps
Not For All Phones… Yet
Though it’s been promised that this new feature will roll out to a “wide range of devices” in the near future, currently you’ll only be able to use Facebook Home on the following phones:
- HTC First (this is the only phone that comes pre-loaded with this feature)
- One X
- One (2013)
- Samsung Galaxy X III
- S4
- Note II
Criticisms Of The New App
Though Facebook Home has only being available to users for a couple of days, the general reception has been less than phenomenal. Currently this new feature has been given several one-star ratings out of five at the Google Play store, and most reviews have given 3 or less stars on the product. There are a number of other concerns that come with this tool, such as privacy concerns (just how much personal information will uses need to share with Facebook?) and data usage charges (if you’re not connected to Wi-Fi, then how much data are you going to be eating up just to check Facebook every 10 to 20 minutes?).
Why This May Catch On
There’s no question that an increasing number of people world wide are hooking into Facebook and spending a lot of time on it every day. A recent study from the Social Aware Blog revealed that on a monthly basis, we’re spending about 6.75 hours on Facebook every single month – a huge increase from the average 2.7 hours we spent on social media network sites back in 2006 (Socially Aware Blog, 2012). there’s no question that the majority of us enjoy being connected, and with most of us connecting to Facebook at least once a day from our mobile phones, it’s likely that having a Facebook Home page will only increase our Facebooking time.