Facebook reveals its first TV ad for Facebook Home

Facebook has just revealed its first television commercial for Facebook Home, which is set to hit your television sets soon. The commercial is titled “Airplane” and it centers around a man who livens up his business trip by bringing his friends “on the journey with him”. Every time he scrolls across his Cover Feed, someone will appear, whether its his friends in the overhead luggage compartments, drag queens popping up all around him, or his nephew smothered in chocolate cake.

The commercial also shows off the upcoming AT&T exclusive HTC First, which will come with an embedded version of Facebook Home. The embedded version of Facebook Home features minor differences to the downloaded version, with the main difference being better app notifications integrated into the Cover Feed feature. The HTC First itself is a low-to-mid ranged phone that you will be able topurchase for $99 on a new two-year contract with AT&T. If you want the phone, but don’t want Facebook Home, you can check out our guide to de-programming the embedded Facebook Home launcher.

Facebook Home follows Mark Zuckerberg’s philosophy that phones should revolve around people, and not apps. It brings your friend’s closer to you through features like the Cover Feed as well as Chat Head Messaging, which lets you message your friends even while you’re in another app. It will also have Instagram-like features where you can double-tap a photo to like it.

Both HTC First and Facebook Home are set to be released on April 12th. You can download the Facebook Home app for free from the Google Play store. The app will bring all of your friend’s status updates and photos to the forefront of your Android device, but how many of us actually want that? We should know once the app launches

Facebook Home for Android is official, coming April 12 on the new HTC First!

Well, it isn’t exactly a Facebook phone, but it has the capability of turning any Android smartphone into one. We’re talking about the new Facebook Home, which just got announced officially. Simply put, it is an Android launcher – replacing the stock interface of an Android device it is installed on with a new one, built around Facebook social networking from the ground up.

As Mark Zuckerberg himself puts it, Facebook Home is designed around people instead of prioritizing apps like other phone interfaces do. By doing so, the software aims to deliver a more personal experience to Facebook users. At the same time, it should be easy to use with its minimalist, simple interface. As soon as the phone is turned on, the user’s list of notification appears with their profile picture at the bottom. Need to dismiss something? Then all it takes is a swipe to the side. A swipe up brings the list of all installed applications.

Something that’s unique to Facebook Home is the Chat Heads feature (and no, we aren’t making that name up). When you’re in a chat with someone, it puts an icon with their picture in the screen’s corner for quick and easy access. There is even a counter that shows how many lines of text you’ve missed.

Facebook Home will be available only on select smartphones at first, but it should spread to many more after its release. That includes both smartphones and tablets. April 12 is the day when Facebook Home will land on the Play Store.

HTC First announced, coming exclusively to AT&T on April 12th for $99.99

Continuing its obsession with the number one, HTC has officially announced the First, an Android device with a bit more Facebook influence than most other smartphones we’ve used in the past — including other handsets given preferential treatment from the social media network during the last four years. HTC’s Peter Chou and AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega took the stage at the event to announce the phone, which is the world’s first Home-optimized device. What exactly that means remains to be seen, but HTC’s Chou indicated it will be a “unique experience.”

There were no specs announced for the device, other than it having LTE, of course. But, earlier leaks have indicated it will be 4.3-inch, 720p mid-range phone, not threatening the HTC One by any stretch of the imagination. It will be available on April 12th exclusively in the US on AT&T for just $99.99

#Finally! Facebook to adopt hashtag support!

You’ve probably all seen the meme built on the geek rage over the use of hashtags on Facebook. The hashtag has never had a useful function in Facebook as it has in its birthplace of Twitter and summer home of Google+, but the hashtag has always had a destiny on the Internet and it’s getting one step closer to being the web standard it deserves to be. A new report says that Facebook will finally adopt hashtag support.

The think about the hashtag is that it is an immensely helpful tool in the online world. People needed an easy way to gather around events and topics (as inane as they may be), and so the hashtag was born. That’s why we’ve always been annoyed at the rage hashtags on Facebook always drew, because those hashtags weren’t useless. They were telling Mark Zuckerberg that he can’t ignore hashtags, and had to add them to Facebook.

According to the Wall Street Journal, that day is coming. No idea when it will happen, but the report says that Facebook is definitely working on adding hashtag support. Facebook already supports tagging people by using either the Twitter standard @ symbol, or the Google+ standard + symbol. This is pretty cool for a tradition created by early Twitter users.

Facebook introduces new News Feed with larger images, choice of feeds and consistent mobile design!

Today, Facebook revealed the latest update for its News Feed feature, something that CEO Mark Zuckeberg says that helps make you see and feel things that users will care about. He believes that it should be more like a personalized newspaper that allows you to not only give you the top stories in the news and also socially relevant and local content from friends and family around you.

The new design sets out to be focused on visual design. Zuckerber says it’s focusing on three things:

– Rich stories that are visually engaging

– Choice of different feeds and dig into any topic you want

– Mobile consistency that shares the same experience across different platforms.

Originally launched in 2006, the News Feed has become the central place where users find information about their friends.

 

Guessing about the future of News Feed

This news follows previous speculation regarding the future of Facebook’s News Feed — TechCrunch said that the social network would launch content-specific News Feeds, while also giving out bigger photos and ads. A clue to this stemmed from something Facebook CEO said during the company’s Q4 earnings call, as noted both by TechCrunch and Business Insider:

As our news feed design evolves to show richer kinds of stories, that opens up new opportunities to offer different kinds of ads as well…One of the product design principles that we’ve always had is we want the organic content to be of the same basic types of formats as paid content, right? So, historically, advertisers want really rich things like big pictures or videos and we haven’t provided those things historically. But, one of the things that we’ve done in the last year is you’ve seen the organic news feed product that consumers use moving towards bigger pictures, richer media and I think you’ll continue to see it go in that direction. And, I think that a lot of the success of products like Instagram is because of that. It’s a very immersive – even on a small screen, just – it’s a wonderful photo product.

Seeking to change

Last November, during one of Facebook’s periodic “whiteboarding” sessions, the company revealed some insights into why there are already two separate feeds for us to consume: the News Feed and the Pages Feed. The former is the place where users will go to find the most engaging content while the latter contains content that they may want to read from Pages that are liked or subscribed to. Expanding this line of thinking and revealing different News Feeds seems to be the natural progression for Facebook and its information.

Earlier this year, Facebook also tweaked the News Feed more by showing larger images and longer previews of links in an attempt to increase engagement.

Privacy concerns abound

It can probably go without saying that today’s announcement could rile up privacy advocates and there will be Facebook Groups and Pages popping up to rally users to quit Facebook over this privacy intrusion. Back in 2011 when the most recent News Feed changes were made, there were concerns that News Feed would give others access to the private posts of people users were not friends with, giving them the ability to Like a post or add comments to it.

Of course, Facebook has denied this claim, saying “Commenting or Liking a post doesn’t change its privacy setting. If you can’t see a post because of its privacy setting, it won’t show up to you anywhere on Facebook including in your News Feed or in your ticker.”

A new look for Facebook News Feed is coming next Thursday

Mark Zuckerberg & Co. on Friday issued invites to select members of the press to “Come see a new look for News Feed.” The media event takes place next Thursday, March 7, at 10am PST, at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. To our non-US readers: it’s an affluent town at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. This invite-only press conference comes less than two months after the company’s January 15 Graph Search launch event.

Facebook has some pretty rabid community so we’re expecting all sorts of backlash when the new News Feed goes live. The company recently updated its iOS client with in-app VoIP calling and a revamped News Feed, with the Like, Comment and Share buttons now found alongside the bottom of posts…

Here’s the invite graphics, via Business Insider.

Not much is known by way of detail except that a new look News Feed is coming.

Our guess?

The company wants to inject more ads into your News Feed.

A mockup by TechCrunch published on January 14, if true, depicts a Flipboard-like News Feed.

Author Josh Constine swears he saw the updated software running on a smartphone with his own two eyes. The upcoming News Feed, he says, creates two separate feeds, each for a few different content types including news and photos.

Users navigate between them by swiping sideways on a photo that serves as a header tile filling the top quarter or so of a portrait layout iPhone screen. Below the header is a larger body tile that takes up most of the rest of the screen. From what I saw, it shows one story at a time, with text and who posted it laid on top of a full-screen image.

For example, instead of the screenshot above where most of the screen is taken up with white, blue, and gray chrome and empty space, the app looks like the mock-up below.

The mockup is Josh’s approximation from his memory so take it with a pinch of salt.

Facebook-owned Instagram earlier in the week announced it passed 100 million active users. The social networking giant also updated its iOS software development kit with better analytics, additional app usage metrics and improved APIs and has worked with carriers to roll out free or discounted Messenger access to 14 additional markets.

By the way, Facebook ranked 48th on Forbes’ Most Admired Companies list. Apple is #1 again and Twitter, which increasingly challenges Facebook, did not even make it into the top 50.