
Steer clear of Facebook’s Home for Android  - gtani
http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2020769323_ptechfacebookreviewxml.html
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bpatrianakos
All this criticism of Facebook home is kind of ridiculous. It's basically
preaching to the choir. What I hear when I've read almost all of the recent
criticisms is "Don't use Facebook Home if you don't like the whole point of
Facebook Home". Well, duh!

Facebook Home is for people who live on Facebook. It doesn't pretend to be
anything different. If you're a Facebook fiend you'll love this. If you read
HN you'll love to hate it. This software is not bad. It just doesn't suit the
purposes of people who, well, have a different use-case in mind for their
phone than the people who would like Home do.

I'd like to see more reviews that are aimed at those who would actually want
to use this software. At this point all we get is "hey, people who would never
like this thing, you shouldn't use it and hey let's have fun hating on it". I
wouldn't use it. I agree with the article completely but my problem is that
the point of the article is irrelevant. Instead there should be balanced
reviews that weigh the pros and cons of this software for the audience it's
aimed at.

This is like going to GNU conference and reviewing Windows as an OS you
wouldn't like and shouldn't use.

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tolmasky
Not sure if you read the article, but it _did_ spend a good while focusing on
why people who like Facebook may not like it: in particular it is missing a
good number of features we're used to in Facebook. For example, I can watch
videos in the Facebook app, but not Facebook home (a little strange).
Similarly, you can't share webpages, etc. His whole thesis was that it took
over too much of the phone while simultaneously not providing enough Facebook
features. Seems like a fair criticism to me.

~~~
bpatrianakos
His main thesis focuses far more on why people who don't live in Facebook
wouldn't like this ("it took over too much of the phone") than why people who
like Facebook will like it. The mention of features Facebook fans would love
was really more of an afterthought than the point. It was like saying "all
this stuff sucks but I guess it'd be cool if you love Facebook". Articles like
this always seem to be written by someone who doesn't understand the audience
of the product.

"So while Home offers _more of Facebook than you’re likely to want_ , it gives
you fewer ways of interacting with the social network than you probably would
like." (emphasis mine)

Written like exactly the kind of person I'm describing. I think if it were
fair criticism then it would focus more on how engrossing and mesmerizing the
author says it is and of course then mention some of its lacking features. If
you take out all the love-to-hate-it parts it'd end up being a fairly positive
review of the product.

And please don't do that, the "not sure if you read the article" thing. I
didn't come away with the same message as you but I read it.

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wsbail29
Hi folks. I'm one of the engineers on Facebook Home (disclaimer these are my
opinions and not those of Facebook). It's been really interesting reading the
early reviews. I think we can learn a lot from them.

The goal of the product is to make your phone feel more alive with content
from the people you care about while still allowing you to efficiently perform
all the typical tasks you use your phone for. The navigation model is a bit
different than what people have become accustomed to, so some confusion is
very understandable; however, we tried very hard to make access to any task
just as efficient on Home as any other launcher. Getting to any app is just
one gesture away: swipe up to launcher; swipe right to the last app; or double
tap the home button to bring up the switcher. As user feedback comes in we'll
continue to tune our model to try and achieve a nice balance between surfacing
social content and completing tasks.

Home was designed and engineered by a pretty small team with a goal of
releasing a high quality, performant, and beautiful product. To ensure our bar
was met, we tried to narrowly focus on doing just a few things but doing them
well for the first release. Of course the trade off here is that some features
that people value are missing. I hope this first version will be judged on the
execution of what we did include as we continue to fill in the gaps in future
releases.

For anyone who has checked it out so far Thank you! I'm looking forward to
making the experience something you'll love.

~~~
sssparkkk
I'm sure you've already received similar feedback; but still: pressing the
home button for me is something that should never result in a spinner showing
up for a few seconds. The first time I saw this I had to restrain myself from
immediately deinstalling Facebook home (and that's coming from someone who
decided to try out the app for at least a few days).

Furthermore I'm missing a way to show the currently showing post in the
Facebook app (I want that because home is missing some features).

Finally: I was somewhat frustrated to learn upon release of Facebook home that
you guys decided to start out us-only. Understandable of course, but please
don't make the rest of the world wait in vain for the arrival of a date (the
12th) that doesn't actually allow you to try out the app (I sideloaded an apk
instead).

On a more positive note: ballsy move, and nice execution!

~~~
wsbail29
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that hitting a loading spinner on the home
screen should never happen. Sounds like you might have encountered a cold
start. Occasionally the Android OS will kill our process to relieve memory
pressure. This tends to happen when you are using an app that consumes a lot
of memory in the foreground and then return to Home. Improving our cold start
time and adding additional protections to our process to make it less likely
to be killed are things we're working on. We're also continuing to tune our
ranking algorithms for showing you the freshest most interesting content when
you turn the screen on. The fullscreen experience of Cover Feed presents some
unique and interesting technical problems to solve, but our goal is that the
most relevant and fresh content is always given the highest priority. We'll
continue to tune this over time and fill in missing features. We'll be making
some blog posts about the engineering of Home soon that will go into more
detail on some of these areas. Thanks for your patience on the wider rollout.
I'm really excited to get this in the hands of more users.

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RexRollman
Steering clear of Facebook entirely would be better advice, I think.

~~~
hkmurakami
It's tremendously useful as a global addressbook / Rolodex for someone who's
lived in various parts of the world.

The problem of course is that this address book has evil tentacles coming out
of it, grabbing at my wallet and other items as I walk down the street.

~~~
RexRollman
That is an interesting point. I suppose if you were using it that way, you
could simply just log in only via Private Browsing or via a dedicated web
browser.

~~~
rolleiflex
Try Fluid. It's essentially a webkit-app-creator for OS X, and it can sandbox
cookies and the session. It also allows facebook to be fired up from
spotlight.

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brianmorris10
I don't think I could be any less inclined to try that app/launcher anyway.

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kolev
Facebook Home could've been nice if there was at least some sign of security.
Everybody getting hold of your phone can post all kinds of nasty stuff on your
behalf to the world. That's a huge oversight, which made me deactivate Home.
It's not so bad otherwise, but having no PIN or password or anything similar
is just a no no go for every sane individual.

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Kiro
I love it.

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OGinparadise
"Steer clear of Facebook’s Home for Android"

I steer clear of Facebook, other than logging in on a separate browser for 10
minutes a day. However, most people are not like me and they are unlikely to
care about the "steer clear" advice. They live on Facebook, jut as most people
live online /browser (but use a Windows computer to get there)

