Facebook has grown from a small collegiate only social network site to a public one with an astounding 1.1 billion users today. Facebook has cornered the social media market, for the most part, and it doesn’t look like they are stopping there. We are now a part the internet age a where all kinds of people that use Facebook, from teenagers to grandparents. Facebook has been trying to expand their website from just an online community to the mobile market. So I wasn’t surprised when I saw that Facebook recently released a new program for your mobile device, Facebook Home.
I tried Facebook Home out for a weekend, and I have to say I was very amused with it. The first thing you must understand is that Facebook Home is not an Application or an OS, but a layer on top of the Android operating system. When you turn your phone on your new home screen is Facebook, and everything is run through Facebook. Facebook Home is not offered for all Android devices or any Apple devices, this significantly reduces the number of potential users. Yet within the first two weeks Facebook Home has been downloaded more than 500,000 times. While this number may seem impressive, it is nothing compared to the 1.1 billion users Facebook has today.
There were a few things that I found really cool while using Facebook Home. First, I really liked that Facebook messenger and your SMS messages were all kept in one message folder. I could talk to people online and still text at the same time from the same place. I really liked this aspect since it allowed for the transition from message to message to be much more fluid. Second, when you received a notification or a message it popped up as a bubble on your home screen, which was a scrolling newsfeed. You could move the bubbles around on the scrolling newsfeed or even dismiss them if you did not want to see them any more. The scrolling newsfeed is very innovative, if you are the kind of person who spends a lot of time on Facebook looking through other people’s posts.
Overall, I would give Facebook Home a three stars out of five. I think they have a great idea, but not enough support from people who want their entire phone run by Facebook. I expect we will hear a lot more about Facebook Home in the upcoming months with their monthly updates. If you are a person who spends a few hours on Facebook daily, then this is definitely the program for you.
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