Mark Zuckerberg unveils Facebook Home for Android – as it happened (2024)

We're going to wrap up our live blog coverage of the release of Facebook Home. For a summary of Mark Zuckerberg's presentation click here. To watch the presentation click here.

Here's video of the Facebook Home announcement. Watch it again (mobile users click here):

Click the link below for photos and specs on the HTC first.

You don't need a First to run Home; Android users with specific devices can download the Facebook service. ButHTC is hoping many users – including first-time phone buyers in places like India and Brazil - will go for the full package.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Boston... Facebook COOSheryl Sandberg is shopping her book promoting social change:

Sandberg spoke to hundreds of professional women at a luncheon, one of a series of events she is scheduled to hold in the area as part of a national campaign to promote her newly released best-selling book, “Lean In, Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.”

“The best way to reform an institution is to run it,’’ Sandberg said. “No one listens to the person on the side of the room.”

It appears that Sandberg made no mention of Home.

If you use Facebook Home, whose aim is to totally integrate your mobile life with Facebook – how can you hope to keep anything on your phone private from Facebook?

Mashable's Alex Fitzpatrick asked them:

Facebook jumped ahead of Google Maps last year to become the No.1 US mobile app, Comscore reported.

Last September, each app was pacing about 80m monthly unique visitors. By the end of the year, Facebook had opened up a 10m lead, 85m-75m. Comscore's Andrew Lipsman writes:

In addition to owning the top app audience ranking, Facebook has consistently ranked #1 in terms of mobile app engagement. Their app currently accounts for 23% of time spent on apps, while sister app Instagram owns another 3% of the market. Various Google apps combine to account for 10% of time spent, with Gmail owning the highest individual share at 3%. These two leading web companies combine for more than 1 out of every 3 minutes spent on mobile apps.

(h/t: @AntDeRosa)

Facebook has released an ad for Home.

It's not the one that aired during the presentation which, we forgot to mention, featured a kid in a party hat whose mouth was covered with chocolate frosting.

This one features an array of young attractive people leading impressively active and rich social lives including holding pot-luck dinners and going out for walks at dusk (also there's a thumb war). Watch it (mobile users click here):

From the comments (tough crowd!), there are practical concerns about functionally turning one's phone into a zombie in the undead Zuckerberg army:

and there are friendly concerns that that name they're using for illustrated chatting is... not good:

Also, that part about the honor of working on a technology that will empower 5bn world citizens?

It's supposed to make money, too:

Is Facebook Home a response to pressure on the newly public company to show Wall Street it can make money?

Faaar from it, Zuckerberg says. Rory Carroll reports:

Asked whether this launch is a response to pressure to monetize, Zuckberg laughs it off. "Oh, that." Bats it away.

He's improved as a performer. Smoother at reading the autocue and looks more comfortable when extemporising and fielding questions.

He still ain't Steve Jobs, but this Zuckerberg a presentational upgrade.

Let's have a quick roundup of what we just heard. Facebook has designed a radically more social mobile phone experience that privileges conversations with friends over apps.

When you unlock your Home-enabled phone, you see your Facebook cover feed. When a friend sends a message or notification those appear in attractive horizontal bar format complete with thumbnail images of the sender. To get to your apps you just swipe sideways. If you're in an app and you get a notification a little thumbnail image of the sender pops up at the margin of the screen.

The phone lets you app out. But its main point is chatting with friends.

In a way it's a version of the phone to please the telephone originalist, the strict constructionist. Phones weren't invented to play samurai fruit on. Phones were invented to reach out and touch someone. Alexander Graham Bell would approve.

Phones developed specially with Facebook Home in mind go on sale in about a week, on April 12, for $99.99 through AT&T, the service provider. The device is called the HTC First – and Facebook's presentation was mercifully free of endless lists of specs, although that info is out there if you need it.

Android users with the requisite configurations can download Facebook Home now. But it's not yet ready fortablet devices, Facebook announced. Whoops.

Does Facebook Home stand a chance of capturing the mobile market? Studies have shown that avid Facebook users check it 14 times a day, for a total of up to a half hour spent surfing the site. It seems like those people would love a phone that prominently features their friends – a phone this social.

Facebook's share price climbed about half a point, to 27.15, during today's presentation. The stock was first offered to the public in May for $38.

The event has wrapped.

Thoughts? Reactions? Do you want your phone to be this social?

Isn't the point of the phone to be social? Is it paradoxical to be against more interactions with friends on a device whose purpose is to interact with friends?

Now Zuckerberg cuts loose with his maniacal vision for world domination. It sounds quite civically responsible in his telling actually:

"Actually only about a third of the world is on the Internet today. So we're really closer to the beginning of this than the end."

5 billion people will have smartphones, he says. Today only 2bn have Internet access.

"We're coming to the point when [most people] will have never seen in their lives what you and I think of as a computer. Think about that for a minute.

"We're about to see the most empowered people in a generation. And it's really an honor to work on these problems."

He does not audibly cackle.

That's a price point: a hundred bucks.

De la Vega says the HTC first will be available April 12 for $99.99, exclusively from AT&T.

You can preorder it today.

The HTC device is called the HTC First, billed as "the ultimate social phone." It's the only phone that has Facebook Home pre-loaded and pre-optimized.

It's a four-color phone with AT&T LTE network speed.

Now AT&T exec Ralph de la Vega is up to explain the service provider's role.

Rory Carroll notes the grand ambitions Facebook has outlined for its new technology:

Zuckerberg raising expectations: 'We're really proud of Home and are excited to get it in your hands. We think this is the best version of facebook there is.'

Now Zuckerberg introduces executives from both HTC and AT&T who, he says, have collaborated to build devices and provide service for Home.

Zuckerberg screens a new video ad featuring a bored guy waiting for his flight to take off. He sees people in his phone and they appear next to him on the plane. It breaks his boredom and carries him to the favorite places of his personal life.

Tagline:

"Welcome to Facebook Home. A whole new experience for your phone."

The mic goes back to Zuckerberg.

"We're really proud of Home, and we're really excited to get it in your hands.

He refers to "the joy you feel when your friend's face pops up with a message."

He thanks everyone who worked on Home.

Rory Carroll is in the hall, with this take on Chatheads:

Joey Flynn, product designer, doing a pretty persuasive pitch for the value of 'Chatheads', which lets you pop in and out of conversations while using other apps.

'Gestures like this make chathead so fun and lightweight..Can manage multiple conversations with just a single tap.'

Applause as he finishes seems to trickle from FB employees into press pool.

Corey Ondrejka, head mobile engineer, explains how Android users can get Home.

If you have the most recent FB app on Android, you will be able to begin installation of Home with one click.

First-time users will be able to choose a trial version, or just jump in whole hog.

The tablet launch is not ready, Ondrejka said.

So Home is ready to go on your Android phone but not on your tablet.

Snap impression: Look at your smart phone and imagine if the text message bubble exploded and saturated everything, and everyone in your contacts grew a bobble head, and whenever you revved up your phone there they would be, your friends' heads, talking to you.

But then you can swipe it away and get to the business side of your phone, the apps.

"It really feels like your friends are always there," the presenter says. "Your friends shouldn't be siloed off from these apps."

The appeal of this phone for you will depend in part on whether you think it's nice to have your friends always there.

A trenchant observation from Mr. Carroll:

Zuckerberg: "The home screen is the soul of your phone.. it sets the tone. We feel it should be deeply personal."

Soul? Not a word you often hear in these parts.

Adam Mosseri, Facebook product designer, is demonstrating how the phone bounces back and forth between the cover feed and messages and apps.

"There's nothing between you and your content. You can literally just reach out and touch it," Mosseri says.

"What we're trying to do is shift people's focus away from tasks and apps, and toward people," he says.

Rory Carroll is in the hall:

More than 400 packed into the hall. Mix of journos and FB employees - who cheer at key bits during Zuckerberg's discourse. We're all in darkness, spotlights on Zuckerberg.

He's a confident, fluent speaker. But talks too fast. A Silicon Valley tic.

While the cover feed and notifications are the main interface of Facebook Home, apps are only a swipe away. You can glide from the main page to the familiar grid of apps on other smart phones.

One app is privileged in the Facebook Home architecture, Zuckerberg says: Messaging.

He begins to explain a feature called Chatheads.

This is kind of cool. If you're in an app and receive a message, the thumbnail image of the sender pops up on the side of the screen. You can tap it and go into message mode - then easily surf back to get to the app.

"We think that Chatheads are this great, personal way to do messaging," Zuckerberg says.

Zuckerberg is walking through Facebook Home.

Home features a cover feed that serves as a home page. If a friend sends a notification it appears on the home page with a thumbnail image of the friend.

"That's putting people first in your phone," Zuckerberg says.

Rory Carroll is in the hall:

And here Zuckerbeg is, in navy hoodie. Consenus among tech press here that the announcement will deflate those expecting amazing new hardware, but could help secure FB's mobile future.

We're calling this: Home.

Now we're going to show you home.

"Facebook isn't just a lightweight app that's running everywhere," Zuckerberg says – a bit defensively? "On average we spend more than three times as much time on Facebook as anywhere else.

"We're not building a phone," he says. "We're not building an operating system. We're building something that's a whole lot deeper."

Today we're going to talk about a new category of experiences.

The Facebook chief is not wearing a drone-proof hoodie.

Zuckerberg says phones are currently designed around apps.

But what would it be like if phones were designed around people instead of apps?

"It would feel really different," he says.

The tradition of using computers has been only to use them when we have a task to perform, Zuckerberg says. The user interface model hasn't changed much in 30 years.

"We have our phones with us all the time, and we just want to know what's going on with the people around us."

Mark Zuckerberg is in the house.

"Today we're finally going to talk about that Facebook phone," he says.

"You're going to be able to transform your Android phone into a great mobile device."

Facebook and HTC have collaborated on a phone before. It was not pretty. The Guardian's Juliette Garside reports:

If the rumours prove correct, the phone will be HTC and Facebook's second collaboration in three years. The first was not a success.In 2011 the HTC ChaCha and Salsa phones appeared, featuring a Facebook button which lit up when the user activated the networking site.

When pressed, the F-button would post a recently taken photo or favourite website link to the owner's Facebook page. The devices were discontinued a few months after launch.

We concur.

Welcome to our live blog coverage of what it appears will be a new"Facebook phone", to be unveiled sometime after 10am PT (1pm ET, 6pm BST) at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The Guardian'sRory Carroll is there and will be filing dispatches throughout the event.

Facebook has been working with Taiwan-based phone manufacturer HTC to produce a handheld device with all major functions run through Facebook. You turn on the phone and you see Facebook. Web searches run through Facebook. To chat with friends – well, you're already on Facebook.

The phonereportedly uses a modified Android operating systemand boasts a slightly larger 4.3-inch display. It would provide easy access to Facebook's instant messaging and Instagram photography applications, and a home screen displaying the owner's news feed.

More importantly for Facebook, the phone aspires to put the software giant at the fore of emerging mobile markets in India, Brazil and elsewhere around the world, not to mention the US. As the popularity of mobile devices surges, Facebook, whose stock is hanging just above $26 prior to the event,is under pressure to show it can compete. The estimated 680 million mobile users who access Facebook every month give the company a giant door to walk through.

But Facebook has failed to develop its own mobile device and to now has seemed to have difficulty settling on a mobile strategy. There's a fear that mobile users will reject Facebook ad strategies as clutter on smaller screens. Today Facebook will try to answer those concerns with product ingenuity – and to stake a claim to the next big thing in mobile.