is anyone else getting a 404 not found when you click on "PRE-ORDER THE HTC FIRST" at http://facebook.com/home
Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android
31–40 of 124 posts
Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android
#32"Phones are communication devices and we spend all day message, in today’s appcentric world, messaging is treated like another app."
Seems like I'm not the target audience. I've had some form of cell phone for 12 years now, and I always needed the cheapest possible account/prepaid thing, because I don't call/SMS enough. If they gave 1000 SMSes, I guess I had like 990 left at the end of the month.
Until now that is. Now suddenly there is a resource in the cell phone accounts I need lots of: data. Not to message and stuff, but to browse the internet. My most common form of communication on it is on forums and email replies I guess.
So phones got useful for people who don't communicate much over a phone? :)
Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android
#33Some serious lack of imagination on Facebook's part. They didn't go the hardware route since it is a lot of work. They didn't go the route of forking Android, since then they would have to partner with hardware manufacturers and that is a lot of work So what do they build instead? A deeply intrusive fork of their App that is not even going to be available on all Androids!
Seriously, this feels like people with broadband installing AOL.
Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android
#34"Phones are communication devices and we spend all day message, in today’s appcentric world, messaging is treated like another app." Seems like I'm not the target audience. I've had some form of cell phone for 12 years now, and I always needed the cheapest possible account/prepaid thing, because I don't call/SMS enough. If they gave 1000 SMSes, I guess I had like 990 left at the end of the month. Until now that is. N…
For perspective, the target audience often will not even know a person's email address.
Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case it's not intents, it's that the homescreen is a replaceable app. This is the most thoroughly rethought homescreen replacement I've seen.
The launcher communicates with the rest of the framework through Intents. It's mostly the same point. If the launcher was responsible for the actual app management (launching via zygote, maintenance of the registry and permissions databases, clean up on uninstall...), you'd never be able to replace it. The Intents framework is what allows the launcher to be "just a replaceable app."
I guess you're right, but there's nothing about intents that assumes the homescreen would be replaceable. That the homescreen is launched via intents must have been a conscious design decision, right?
Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android
#36I'm really sad about the still-all-too-walled-garden:
The ideas of active information at a glance is cool, but honestly, for it to be really useful for me, I don't want just FB, and definitely not just photos. I'd be happier with some Flipboard-style article previews, and I'd like some of that information to come from Twitter, Reddit/HN, or even (gasp) Google+.
Similarly chatheads are pretty cool, but with my current set of frequent conversation-partners, it wouldn't be all that useful to me without letting google talk/babble into the mix. (though I appreciate they at least included SMS).
I am also REAL concerned about all the content visible on the lock screen: if you misplace your phone, suddenly all your friends' "friends only" posts are "friends + that guy who found/stole my friend's phone".
... and overall I'm just fundamentally torn. On the one hand the whole idea just screams "Digiphrenia". Their own advertisement supported this better than I could articulate. On the other hand, I still fundamentally am excited about the base idea of keeping people actively connected and am pretty onboard for the people-first focus.
Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android
#37Facebook has always wanted to collect as much personal information from its users as possible. This is a brilliant move to get this data the easiest way possible - they didn't even need create their own phone or even their own OS. Android users - especially teens - will eat this up and FB will instantly be able to gather all the info they want without the target demographic even thinking about the privacy implications.
Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android
#38I do think replacing the launcher was a smart idea, but I'm just not sure if that kind of integration is useful in FB's case. Maybe I'm a minority, but I just don't route my life through FB and do not want to, at all. This only seems useful to people who exclusively use their phone for FB. Why would I want a layer of FB between me and the home screen where all my other apps live?
The UI did look pretty slick, though at times it seemed like some elements were quite tiny for touch targets.
Overall: I really loathe the term "chathead"
Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android
#39I think that this is a smart move by Facebook building a layer over Android. At least at this stage anyway because, they’ve now positioned themselves in a great position because they’ve made it harder for Google to go back on the openness of Android which has allowed them to build Facebook Home in the first place. Likewise, if carriers and users devote a lot of time to the application then, Facebook have bought themselves time to eventually fork Android and create a new revenue stream like, Amazon have done with the Kindle.
Re: Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android
#40Great, now Facebook can serve ads straight to my phone home screen too.