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."
slashdot fail (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
It actually does if you make money from your web site . A summary that points to another /, section, "Business Intelligence", provides another chance for a fresh set of ads and beacons. To paraphrase: If we're not paying for Slashdot, we are the product...
Widgets are better than a home screen replacement (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:3)
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?
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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.
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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
In Other News (Score:2)
Area Man says, "This turd needs some polishing."
Sheryl who? (Score:2)
Do we have a track record on this one?
Re: (Score:2)
OK. I read the wikipedia article on her. She has done some nice stuff representing women in business. But that's about as close as her background gets to geeks. From what I can see she's crunching customers and a path to a win in a sad virtual game I deleted years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
She wrote the idiotic self-contradictory book [slate.com] called Lean In which is the woman business advice book du jour. It is obvious she has connections to get herself trumpeted all over MSM for this farce on pulp. Simply assign this book (and her) the same importance any sane person does to anyone spewing the latest business advice targeted at a female audience. None - because ultimately it will be completely forgotten and irrelevant in six months time.
A Repetitive Theme (Score:2)
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 [sencha.com] were able to put together a half-decent Facebook app, for the noble purpose of demonstrating that Zuckerberg is completely ignorant of technology.
I tried the Facebook Home app... (Score:2)
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 :)
Yes it does.. (Score:1)