Facebook Home: Making friends with your phone

Facebook Home is more than an application and less than an operating system; giving it the unofficial moniker of ‘apperating system’.

Facebook Home is a ‘launcher’, essentially a piece of software on Android phones that changes and customizes the home screen and applications section on your Android phone. Mobile phone manufacturers such as Samsung and HTC include custom launchers as part of their offer on mobile phones, although their customization is generally far deeper than what Facebook has done.

Facebook Home brings your Facebook news feed to your home screen: instead of seeing apps, you see people. Power up your phone, you’re shown the Facebook Cover Feed: activities from friends and pages you’ve liked.

You can swipe and flip through the cover feed to see what your network is up to, or double tap to like an activity right from the feed. There’s also a Like and Comments button in the bottom corners for deeper engagement.

You can see your Facebook photo in a circle at the bottom of the screen. Tapping and holding it will bring up a menu that links to the messenger component or to a list of apps. Facebook also has a strong presence here, with dedicated buttons for ‘Status’, ‘Photo’, and ‘Check In’ featured for easy and quick Facebook functionality.

With home, Facebook is introducing ‘Chat Heads’: a way to keep chatting with your friends when you’re using another app or playing a game. Traditionally, when you’re using another application and get a message, you ‘switch’ to the chat window to reply. With Chat Heads, an icon of your friend’s picture appears on top of the application or game you’re using, and you can reply to them right from there. No need to switch applications. And in case you’re not looking to reply right now, just swipe away the chat heads and continue what you were doing. Moreover, Chat Heads also supports SMS so you’re essentially installing Facebook on your message service.

Facebook Home is an attempt by the company to deliver a deeper and more engaging experience to your phone. Facebook has made a commitment to update Facebook Home once a month, so they are taking this quite seriously.

This compelling experience however is being rolled out in phases. For now, Facebook Home will only be available on five devices and in the US. More devices and other countries will be rolled out in the coming weeks.

The writer is a digital marketing professional and an early adopter of all things digital