Sheryl Sandberg: Facebook's Home App Needs Some Work 34
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."
Poor Performance (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
News feed. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.