Apparently, Facebook Home isn’t dead yet. According to Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg, the company has an ultimate goal to make the modern smartphone much more social. The current build of Facebook Home is just an early version, which the company plans to optimize over time. During an interview at the D11 conference, Sandberg said that Facebook will release monthly updates for the platform as they continually improve the user experience.
Sandberg thinks that even though Facebook Home wasn’t totally successful, there’s a general consensus that the two core features are pretty desirable; namely the preview pane and the chat heads.
“Reviews are ones or fives.”
Essentially, she means that there’s no grey area when it comes to how users feel about the platform. Sandberg seems to think it’s because of the stark contrast in users. Regular Facebook users love the platform because it extends their experience, while adversely those who don’t use Facebook much dislike the app because it takes away from the streamlined Android experience.
Clearly, Facebook Home is a bold move for the company and its part of their overall plan to focus on mobile. Zuckerberg has even mentioned in the past that the company needs to focus more on the mobile side of the market, and this is evident with the recent improvement of the company’s mobile apps.
In today’s market, mobile reels in about 30 percent of all revenue compared to zero percent not too long ago. It’s because of this fact, and several Facebook specific statistics that Sandberg believes the company has an advantage when it comes to the mobile world. With desktop PCs, Facebook accumulates about one minute for every seven minutes users spend on the computer, as opposed to mobile devices where Facebook sees one in every five minutes spent. That can probably be attributed to boredom, not to mention it’s very easy to pop open the Facebook app on your smartphone. Hell, there are times when I open Facebook to see what’s going on just out of sheer habit. By the time I realize what I’m doing, it’s too late and I’m already scrolling through my Facebook news feed.
To recap, Facebook is going to focus more on the mobile side of things and Facebook Home will slowly be updated to offer an improved user experience. Let’s hope those future updates are for the better. While I don’t exactly like the current setup of Facebook Home, I would still like to see some of the ideas that it brings to Android improved upon.
What about you?
Via TechCrunch