Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Home

facebook.com

121–130 of 227 posts

Re: Facebook Home

#122
Thanks for all the great feedback. It's awesome to see how much everyone likes the site.

I was the designer and Nick Kwiatek (http://nkwiatek.com) 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.

Re: Facebook Home

#124

Sometimes, I hate being such a cynical person. 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 (c…

How is that cynical? Facebook's primary product is data mining. You are what they're selling. Not your content (directly, at least.)

Re: Facebook Home

#125

Regardless of your thoughts on the actual Home product, this product page is incredibly well designed and thought out.

It's pretty, but I left with no idea what exactly the product is.

It's basically a Facebook branded home screen. Instead of the regular home screen with a bunch of icons to launch different applications, the home screen is now essentially a Facebook application. There's also some stuff to access Facebook functionality (chat, etc.) while using other applications.

Re: Facebook Home

#126
post #16

I take issue with the problem statement: "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." 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…

" Maybe I don't fit the demographic, but I don't want [task-orientation] to become second-class citizens over friend communications. " You're not their demographic. Phones are still a primarily social technology for most people. The most popular features, voice calls, text messaging, and possibly email, revolve around people . P.S. I know several people who friend news sources and bloggers and use Fb as an ersatz RSS…

I think you're confusing social interactions and socializing, which are quite different in intent. While socializing requires social interaction, it's not the other way around, and social media feeds off of socializing.

Perhaps I'm not in the demographic either, since a majority of my call and email usage is not based in any form of socializing. Texting, somewhat more, but I do little texting, and when I do it's usually just for logistical purposes -- "meet you at 6pm at FooBar" -- which also isn't socializing.

Re: Facebook Home

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty, but I left with no idea what exactly the product is.

It's a Facebook. Same problem as ~4 years ago when people first saw the iPad: "What exactly is it?" "It's iPad." "How do I quantify it in my paradigm of notebook computers?" "You don't." You're trying to quantify it as a smartphone. Facebook is positioning it as...well...a Facebook.

That seems like a somewhat poor example. When people first saw the iPad, it was quite rightly explained as "basically a big iPhone", which was completely sufficient to get an idea of the product.

Re: Facebook Home

#128

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. 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.

"With this phone, I'm forced into an environment where I feel like I need to be social all the time" I think this was probably a user story for them and definitely one of their biggest motivations, unfortunately lol.

Oh yeah, it's not a question of "user that doesn't want to be social", I'm sure their stories are more centered around "how to enforce social behavior and destroy the concept of temporary isolation and privacy in this particular demographic".

Re: Facebook Home

#129

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.

Didn't the Microsoft Kin also integrate as such?

Re: Facebook Home

#130

Sometimes, I hate being such a cynical person. 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 (c…

it might just be a hook to induce more people to install a facebook app and/or use facebook. i don't use the facebook app myself (as you say, i don't want facebook having access to my phone), but if i did i would see no real privacy reason not to use this one too.
Post reply on HN