Long story short: Facebook Home is Zuckface’s effort to get you to run the Facebook app as the UI of your Android phone. Apparently it’s going to be a full middleware piece, designed to run all your chat through Facebook and ease your camera shots into Facebook and use your News Feed as your home screen and…
This was inevitable, really. They have to get pride of place on your mobile device to maximize the amount of data they can collect and advertise against, and the middleware approach is a lot cheaper than coming up with an Android fork (like Amazon) or an entire phone OS (like Microsoft) or an entire whole-package phone (like Blackberry or Apple). But the pitch of “make the Facebook app the UI of your whole phone” appeals to me not at all. Nothing ever worked better by adding more plumbing.
(Of course, this all assumes you have Facebook at the core of your social strategy rather than “that one thing hanging out on the side that I check once a week to make sure nothing’s happened to my East Coast gang or my old high school friends” – which is increasingly not the case. Facebook has a way of turning into an avalanche of your mother’s forwarded chain emails punctuated by ads. I couldn’t function without Twitter, but I wouldn’t notice if Facebook disappeared tomorrow – and the risk that we’ve passed Peak Facebook is probably what’s driving the urgency to get onto mobile in an unmissable way as quickly as they can.)