Desperate to make its homescreen replacement Home seem less invasive, Facebook is advertising that you can temporarily deactivate it and use your HTC First or other Android phone as normal. The fact that Home replaces your widgets and app folders has been a core complaint. Facebook vows to fix that, but until then it’s reminding people they can leave Home for stock Android or their old launcher.

The post by the Facebook Mobile Page which was also being shown as an ad in some peoples mobile feeds, says “Cover feed on the HTC First keeps your friends close by. But if you need some alone time, simply turn off Home and use your phone as usual. http://bit.ly/htcfirsthome“.  When turned off, the HTC First reverts to stock Android 4.1, and the downloadable version of Home gives way to whatever launcher users had installed before.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg addressed the issue of users’ disappointment with how Home takes over their phone this week at D11 when asked if the product was a success:

“Facebook Home is v1 of what we think is a very large transformation that we think will absolutely happen, which is rebuilding your phone around people.

The way [phones are] organized is still around activities and apps. We think that phones will be reorganized around people, and we think Facebook Home is the first version of that. We consider it v1, very early. We’d love if we could put out a v1 version and get everything right. The feedback we’re getting is very bi-modal. If you look at our stars, we get fives and we get ones. We get almost no threes.

The people who love it, they’re heavy Facebook users. They want that experience. Not only do they love it but the metrics are working very well for us. They’re using Facebook 25% more and they’re doing 10% more more messaging. So this is a win, both in terms of how this will drive our business and for them.

For the people who don’t love it, they don’t like how it takes over their phone. They don’t like how the launcher re-organizes the apps they’ve already launched, but for the most part they actually like the two core features we launched which are Cover Feed and Chat Heads. So what we are doing is getting that feedback. I don’t know how long it will take. I think it will be a long road. but we really believe we’re on a path to making phones more social.”

As Sheryl explained, a big issue with Home was the sacrifice you have to make to use it. Android users gain some features, but have to give up much of the personalization they’ve worked to build into their phone in the form of widgets, folders, and app organization. I believe their omission from Home is related to some of the team that built Home being iPhone users who don’t have these options normally, so they didn’t miss them.

Supporting these customization features could make Home more of a bonus than a trade. When Home launched, Facebook Product Director Adam Moserri told me there were a lot of features he wished had made it into the initial build, including app folders.

Now Facebook is trying to get some of that functionality added through its monthly updates to Home. On May 9th at a small press conference at Facebook headquarters, Moserri unveiled Dock, a tray of a user’s favorite apps that’s persistently visible at the bottom of homescreen app launcher. Facebook plans to let users import their Dock of most frequently used apps from their previous Android launcher into Home.

Many are calling Home a flop already, and maybe it will be, but it’s early to make that judgement now. Facebook has a very long-term view for the software. Mark Zuckerberg’s belief is that we’re destined to share more and more with our friends, so some will want to prioritize them ahead of utility applications in their phones.

Zuckerberg told Wired’s Stephan Levy, “Three years from now, people are going to be sharing eight to ten times as much stuff. We’d better be there, because if we’re not, some other service will be.” That’s the goal of Home. But for Facebook to get to that future, it needs Home to gain traction. It’s hasn’t yet, having only hit one million downloads on May 10th. The active user count is suspected to be much smaller. As Sandberg said, it will be a long road to success…if Facebook’s even going in the right direction.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While Facebook’s announcement focused on the “Home” homescreen app that can run on any unforked Android, HTC has just confirmed to me it worked with Facebook to modify Android to give its First handset features not available in the downloadable version of Home. Specifically, the First can pipe in email and calendar notifications to your homescreen.

“Yes we had to implement some framework changes and some hooks to do the system notifications”, explained HTC Partner Manager Michael Goodwin. He tells us “all the things that could appear in your Android notification tray can appear within Facebook Home” thanks to the changes to Android.

During the event, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Director Of Product Adam Mosseri also mentioned during the event that the HTC First was optimized to give the best possible Home experience. [Update: After the event, Mosseri told me "We didn't fork Android, we extended it. HTC was helpful, and they actually wrote the code. We've worked with OEMs a lot and we pre-load a lot but we've created new APIs with a partner before but they were a pretty convenient. We learned."]

This confirms my scoop from last week that Facebook would debut an HTC handset running a modified version of Android that would give it extra functionality. The HTC First is now available for pre-order for $99.99 from AT&T, and will ship on April 10th for arrival on April 12th.

HTC’s President Jason Mackenzie explained why HTC put in this extra effort to optimize Home for the First. “It’s to provide a consistent experience. To offer the easiest, simplest solution for the customer. They shouldn’t have to get Chat Heads or messages from Facebook one way, and find out if you have text messages or email some other way. This delivers on Facebook and Mark’s vision of bringing your friends to the forefront instead of the applications.”

Home from Google Play only shows Facebook content on the homescreen, whereas on the HTC First and its flavor of Android you can get Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook email, info about available Wi-Fi networks, and more notifications fed into your homescreen. Additionally, on the HTC First, you’ll be able to swipe up to to show your app shortcuts, and then swipe right to reveal a Google Search bar that doesn’t exist in the downloadable version of Home.

So in fact, the “Facebook Phone” by HTC will offer a less-exclusively Facebook experience than just downloading the Facebook Home app for standard Androids.

Watch the video interview with Michael Goodwin of HTC for more details.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

These are numbers any startup would love to post.

In its first day, Bridge signed up 1,000 developers. In the span of one week the messaging platform has delivered more than 60 million messages. It has had more than 500 server downloads.

In January, the startup previously known as Flotype, announced it had raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, InterWest, Yuri Milner, Salesforce, and Y Combinator. Flotype was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2011 class.

Bridge provides a secure machine-to-machine messaging environment that scales data delivery between servers, apps, iPhones, laptops and any other node you can think of these days in this cloud connected world. Bridge is built on Erlang, a language fitting for building complex distributed systems. It also use VMware technologies such as RabbitMQ underneath to power Bridge.

Today’s young companies thrive by building services and systems that do not require significant engineering resources. Bridge is well suited to them in that regard. But its golden goose is in the downloads. Bridge will build its business by charging companies on a per core basis for the downloadable server that it calls Bridge Server.

Architecting systems in this post-PC age is a complex task. To connect vast node networks, messaging system, developers need simple components that do not need knowledge of the entire system.

Startups have pretty much had to build these systems themselves. Facebook built Thrift. Google developed a system called Protocol Buffers. Evernote, Quora, LinkedIn, Twitter and a long list of well-known companies have in-house solutions in place.

The Bridge technology follows in the foot steps of middleware messaging platforms like Tibco and IBM. These legacy technologies have been tried and true in the enterprise. They are also of a different age, requiring people with specialized knowledge to keep them running and optimized.

Bridge’s deepest competition will come from the legacy giants when Bridge starts working with large enterprise operations. But there again, Bridge’s strength will come in how much it can help an organization develop a messaging service that is affordable and made for on-premise and the cloud.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Here’s something we couldn’t fit in the headline: Phrases, Facebook’s second-largest app after FarmVille, is now relying solely on countries outside the United States for its traffic. The app has picked up over three million people from around the world to lead this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing apps by monthly active users.

Here’s the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Phrases	50,243,643	+3,119,597	+7%
2.	SmileyCentral	8,455,363	+1,781,588	+27%
3.	Social Fun	2,629,972	+1,306,558	+99%
4.	Birthday Cards	10,266,094	+1,280,624	+14%
5.	Disfrázate	3,407,869	+1,192,436	+54%
6.	Crime City	3,914,363	+1,189,145	+44%
7.	BandPage by RootMusic	9,473,200	+946,482	+11%
8.	Ravenwood Fair	2,437,040	+865,539	+55%
9.	Windows Live Messenger	11,634,095	+857,773	+8%
10.	لعبة الحقيقة	1,675,797	+818,116	+95%
11.	Texas HoldEm Poker	36,854,573	+751,762	+2%
12.	Zoo World	8,245,210	+724,970	+10%
13.	My Kingdom	1,902,183	+667,271	+54%
14.	iHeart	1,075,654	+652,347	+154%
15.	TripAdvisor – Cities I’ve Visited™	9,443,815	+586,353	+7%
16.	Frases Diarias	9,590,068	+578,952	+6%
17.	dtac one D.I.Y.	1,661,895	+543,217	+49%
18.	๑۩۞۩๑ HAPPY HALLOWEEN ! ๑۩۞۩๑	959,279	+493,218	+106%
19.	Simply Hospital	1,156,790	+448,768	+63%
20.	Commit to Vote Challenge	1,205,505	+439,700	+57%

We’re not entirely sure why Phrases is offline in the United States, but it could be related to Facebook’s most recent privacy scandal; some sources allege that Phrases, like other apps, was selling user information. For now, the app is just loading a simple message: “Sorry, currently Phrases can’t be accessed from within the US. We’ve had to make this tough decision in spite of the support of our fans in the US. Currently we have no timeline for lifting this restriction. We’re really sorry!”

It will take a month for the loss of its US users to cycle into Phrases’ MAU count, but it’s notable that the app has shed only a tiny percentage of its DAU, a number that responds much more quickly to changes. So it seems reasonable to assume that Phrases is drawing almost all of its numbers from Facebook’s nearly 400 million international users. By that measure, Phrases crosses the path of almost 15 percent of all international users.

The last point we’ll note about Phrases is that it’s now only 10 percent smaller than FarmVille, at least counting by MAU.

SmileyCentral comes in second, but the rapidly-growing app may have also run into policy problems with Facebook — users are reporting that the downloadable toolbar is no longer working on the social network, and its DAU is, unlike Phrases, registering a sharp drop.

Most of the remaining apps on the list continue growing as they have in past weeks. The one to take note of is BandPage by RootMusic, which has heated up significantly; the app should cross 10 million MAU this week. We last reviewed BandPage in August.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook