Getting lost - My Facebook Home Experience

While waiting for my iPhone 5 in the mail, I decided to make use of my Galaxy Note 2 for one last experiment. I decided to install Facebook Home on my Galaxy Note 2 and check it out. 

Facebook Home is seen by many as a strategic move from Facebook to enter the mobile market. Over the years, Facebook has seen a huge movement in user engagement towards mobile channels rather than the traditional desktop/laptop model. This user evolution has caused panic to some of its investors as Facebook initially looked unprepared for this movement. It had no way of capturing user behaviour thru mobile and also had no way of pushing advertising to its mobile site. It started to feel like Facebook was struggling to keep up with its market. Users were viewing Mobile as the future while Facebook was looking at it as a dead-end. 

The launch of Facebook Home is seen by many as the answer to Facebook's Mobile challenge. There were rumours initially that Facebook was going to launch its own smartphone to solve this problem. Good thing this did not happen. What we got instead was an App or an Android Theme layered over an Android OS. At first, I thought Facebook Home was a great idea until I started using it. 

Design.
The app is beautifully designed from the aesthetics standpoint. Playing with Facebook Home on a giant screen like the Note 2 was beautiful. Images
really popped and the gesture controls for them app were intuitive. Sadly, however that is the only good thing I can say about Facebook Home. It just looks nice and shinny and beautiful.

Feeling grounded at Home

My initial reaction to Facebook Home was that of being grounded. I felt so restricted in terms of what I can do on my phone. The gigantic images of my friends lunch and self-portraits immediately turned into an annoyance. I immediately felt something I thought was not possible- I felt I had too much Facebook. Yes I still have access to my other apps and other Android functions but it is buried under the omnipresent Facebook experience. My phone lost its identity as a phone, rather it got reduced into a dumb brick of randomly generated images of people I slowly did not want to see anymore. Now Facebook has become not only my Social media hub but my portal to the entire world. To answer to a text message I have to get out of Facebook, to call someone I have to get out of Facebook, etc. Everything I used to do on my phone now has an added layer/step to the process- and Facebook became a hindrance. 

Locked out of Facebook

I wanted to vent my frustration about Facebook Home thru Facebook Home to create some sort of poetic irony but I could not figure it out. The main page of your Facebook home has a small bubble of your Profile image, if you tap and slide it up it goes to your Android Apps, if you slide it to the right  it opens your Facebook News Feed, and if you slide to the left it opens your Facebook Messages. Notifications apear in the middle of your screen but disappear right away once you tap anywhere on screen. The main focus of Facebook Home is clear- images. We have seen this focus with the revamped Timeline and News Feed and we are seeing it in Facebook Home. Big images are ok but the images seem to come at random and make no sense. They do not seem to be ranked based on number of likes, comments etc and not even by date posted. After a few minutes of playing around with the app, I felt like Facebook was being dumed down too much. Over the years, Facebook has evolved into a source of information for me, not only as a means to stay connected with friends. I have followed people who are considered experts in certain fields, organizations I care about etc. Facebook home does not give me the ability to stay connected and updated with Pages I have liked and Content being shared by my friends. With Facebook home, it is all about images on my screen, no matter if the images are ugly or are not relevant to me. Facebook Home not only made my smartphone dumber but made Facebook a lot more boring. 

Go Home and re-think this

I believe Facebook is going about their Mobile Challenge the wrong way. If they want a way to capture user behaviour in mobile then they must not hijack the entire mobile experience. If they want to see how users utilize different apps and services on their mobile phone then Facebook should act as a facilitator not as a layer or hindrance to it. I am all for what Facebook is trying to achieve here but sadly Facebook Home is just overkill. I do not think anyone out there is prepared to have Facebook front and center of their mobile life. Facebook's engineers have to figure out a way to turn Facebook Home into a mobile facilitator in the OS user interface. It should not be an ever present application that feels intrusive and forced. There is no wonder Facebook Home only has 2 stars in Google Play Store and I feel like it will only keep going down unless they seriously re-think their move into Mobile. 

My smartphone is still a phone to begin with, the fact that Facebook Home has made it harder for me to make a phone call is a big problem. Facebook needs to find a solution that does not create a problem. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Justice is blind but the scale is rigged when it comes to whistleblowers.

Image
General David Petraeus was sentenced to two years probation and a $100K fine for leaking classified information (link to  plea deal ). This sentence is nothing short of an insult to the justice system in the United States. It is a clear example of how the justice system in the United States is rigged.  Let us recall what got Petraeus into this mess by looking at two things - i. What did he leak? ii. What was intention for leaking the information?  What did he leak? Petraeus leaked names of covert operatives, war plans for US forces, and detailed discussion with senior officials including the US President. This information was contained in notebooks that Petraeus kept for himself. He then gave Paula Broadwell access to these notebooks to help her write his biography. The information contained in those notebooks are highly classified by any standard and had the potential of endangering US covert operatives.  When Chelsea Manning leaked the Afghan war-l...
Read more

How a robbery in 1976 robbed US citizens of their privacy in the digital age.

B altimore - Shortly after midnight on March 5, 1976 Mrs. Patricia Mcdonough was robbed just outside her home. She was able to take a good look at the robber and his 1975 Monte Carlo automobile. A few days after the robbery, Mrs. McDonough started receiving threatening phone calls from the man claiming to be the robber. Mrs. McDonough started recording some of these threatening phone calls and notified the police. On March 13, the police asked the telephone company to install a terminating accounting equipment on Mrs. Donough's telephone line to determine the origin of the calls she was receiving. The police found out that most of the calls were made from pay-phones near McDonough's residence.  On March 16, in the general vicinity of Mrs. McDonough's home, someone asked a police officer for help in opening the locked door of his 1975 Monte Carlo. The officer helped the man, took down his plate# and notified the investigating officer.  The police ran the pla...
Read more

Tim Cook on Privacy.

Apple is leading the way in promoting user privacy in the digital age and recently Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered a speech during an event in Washington where he made some very important and controversial points about privacy in the digital age.  "Like many of you, we at Apple reject the idea that our customers should have to make tradeoffs between privacy and security...We can, and we must provide both in equal measure. We believe that people have a fundamental right to privacy. The American people demand it, the constitution demands it, morality demands it.” This statement is supported by Apple's action being the first major phone manufacturer to make encryption as a default in its Operating System. It goes to show how serious Apple is in protecting customer privacy and in not making money out of customer information. There are hundreds of millions of iOS devices all over the world and each one is connected to the internet. Whenever these devices connect to the internet ...
Read more