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Sheryl Sandberg: Facebook's Home App Needs Some Work
Nerval's Lobster writes "Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told an audience at AllThingsDigital's D11 conference that the social network's 'Home' app for Android has a viable future despite needing some work. 'I think it will be a long road,' she told the audience. 'We believe that the phone will get reorganized around people—Home is the first iteration of that.' But Home could require a good deal of tweaking, at least if user feedback is any sort of indication. After installing the Home app, the Android user's screen displays a modified version of the Facebook news feed, with an emphasis on images; other features include 'Chat Heads,' a messaging interface that sprinkles the screen with little icons of friends' heads. While that's a great way to get Facebook front-and-center on someone's phone, the software's one-star reviews on the Google Play storefront greatly outnumber the four- and five-star reviews."
Facebook is trying to grab as much power as possible, as usual.
Instead of releasing slick widgets which would leverage android while not taking over, Facebook decided to replace the home screen. This may give them more control, but I can't think of a faster way to ruin an android phone, and apparently other people agree.
This ongoing disaster is exactly what Facebook deserves. Not for it's ham-handed grab at the Android home screen, but for making your profile "like" advertisements in your friends' newsfeeds that you never "liked" without your knowledge.
Don't ever like anything on facebook, or your friends' newsfeed will be spammed by advertisements falsely linked to you. You have been warned.
The FaceBook Android app is part of what made me finally leave FaceBook. They quite obviously treat Android as a second class citizen. The performance sucks, the permissions suck, the memory usage sucks and the interface sucks. I should thanks them for being such *wonderful* developers.
Gee, among people I have heard discuss FB, from people who love it to people who grudgingly use it, the "News Feed" or what have you never comes up as well-liked feature. In fact, for all of these social media baubles, the "feed" is almost always problematic. These feeds are the #1 reminder of everything that sucks about "social networking", and an obstacle to maintaining a useful social media presence and not having your time wasted.
Of course, if people only use FB in ways that are actually useful, they won't see the things that make FB money -- the ads. Sponsored content is why Home is about the "news feed".
Well, FB, you can't do right doing wrong. People don't want to see your ads by default. Of course, you could create an interface where people who want to look at lazer targeted ads. You could charge a subscription and do quite well with an ad-free interface. But the mostest money is to be had by selling zillions of garbage impressions to wannabe hucksters. Thus you will be forever fighting an uphill battle to waste people's times with content they don't want.
wtf the second link in the summary points to the summary itself? that doesn't even make sense.
Why is "Lying to your friends to sell stuff" an option in the settings? And why is it checked by default? Doesn't it fall foul of some "truth in advertising" laws at least somewhere in the world?
Area Man says, "This turd needs some polishing."
You seem to be contradicting yourself. If Facebook is really doing what you describe:
...for making your profile "like" advertisements in your friends' newsfeeds that you never "liked" without your knowledge.
Then not liking anything on Facebook shouldn't protect you at all.
Don't ever like anything on facebook, or your friends' newsfeed will be spammed by advertisements falsely linked to you.
Do we have a track record on this one?
You like a company, but then they make posts where you like particular advertisements you know nothing about.
What's that? Facebook produces bad software? Say it ain't so.
This story should be titled, "Facebook's Mobile Team Continues to Suck". These guys were able to put together a half-decent Facebook app, for the noble purpose of demonstrating that Zuckerberg is completely ignorant of technology.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
And disabled it a few minutes later. Facebook's Home application seems to operate under the impression that the primary use of my smartphone is to visit their site, as it makes everything else that the phone can do more time consuming to reach. Funny me... I thought that I bought my smartphone to check e-mails and answer phone calls. What a novel idea :)
She is right.. it does need some final work to be bury in a grave.