

Facebook Vies To Become Your Homepage – And Why That’s A Big Deal - BvS
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/21/facebook-homepage/

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philk
_When you can tap your entire social graph for answers to your queries, sites
like Facebook have the ability to push aside search engines like Google as the
first site that springs to mind when people think about surfing the WWW to
find information, connect to other people, communicate with friends, and so
on._

Am I somehow connecting to the wrong Facebook or something? Because whenever I
log in all I get is dull status updates from people I somewhat know.

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pavs
The problem is you are relying on TechCrunch for tech punditry.

Techcrunch is one of those tech blogs that has very little knowledge about
technology.

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brown9-2
Can you name some "tech pundits" that actually do have "knowledge" or at least
make useful and accurate predictions?

Seems to me like it's the kind of field where if you were good at it, you'd be
doing something else with those skills...

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pavs
Yes sure.

Arstechnica, Engadget. Hell, even gizmodo does a better job.

Have you never heard of tech journalist with tech backgrounds? Or finance
journalist with economics background?

I don't think a single TC bloggers have any tech background and they continue
to spew out rubbish day in and day out.

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BvS
"But for many people, social networking sites are slowly taking over at least
part of the role of search engines, which is mainly to retrieve information."

Don't agree, they are rather take part of the role of tv.

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robryan
I'd tend to say more phone calls, SMS and to some extent instant messaging.
You could say Twitter, being a broadcast medium has taken over TV more, but it
compliments it more than anything.

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citizenkeys
Facebook is Microsoft's trojan horse to win two wars: search and mobile.
Microsoft is a major investor in Facebook and thus far has been losing both
search and mobile to Google.

With Facebook as the home page, Microsoft becomes the de facto search engine
for millions of people because Bing is already integrated into Facebook.

Also, with more people communicating via Facebook mobile, Microsoft slowly but
surely inches its way to winning the war on mobile through integration with
Facebook on mobile devices.

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johndbritton
I don't use a homepage at all, when I launch my browser it takes me to a blank
page and I request what I want directly. I really don't like to be distracted
by a default home page.

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paul9290
Facebook as stated they are not making a phone, but they didnt say they were
not making a phone OS like Android. Im thinking a Facebook mobile OS makes
sense. THose you want to talk(voice, text, IM, pics, etc) with are on your
facebook now and they just released their new social inbox. This is all
speculative but just maybe they'll do this?

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NZ_Matt
I can see this happening. A phone marketed as having Facebook OS will appeal
to a huge market.

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robryan
I think though we are moving away from the homepage though, I prefer how
chrome displays the 8 most visited pages upon opening.

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NZ_Matt
I doubt my parents or sister would know how to change their homepage manually.
These are the people that Facebook are targeting this feature at. Not tech
nerds.

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robryan
I don't really buy this kind of thing, not these days, sure there will be some
percentage of people who are new to computers but in general I don't think so.

Pretty much every program on windows/osx you ever interact with has an options
display accessible from the top menus and pretty much all of them have the
ability to change the homepage.

Now I would agree that a popup like this give people motivation to change,
perhaps that haven't considered it before, but I doubt many that have been
using computers for some time would have trouble changing there homepage if
motivated to do so.

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kellishaver
I can already ask my friends if I want information that they may have. More
over, there are at least a dozen ways I can do so in a medium that's not
littered with daily horoscopes, stupid quizzes, Farm Mafia Mob Zombie Fish
Wars, and photos of pets from people I barely knew in high school. Search
engines are for things my friends don't know, or for those times when I don't
want to _bother_ those friends, because I know they're busy with more
important things to do than sit on Facebook all day long.

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olalonde
I haven't used a homepage since browsers implemented the save tabs feature.

