Facebook announces its newest venture, Facebook Home

If you own an Android smartphone, you may well be using Facebook’s latest creation, Facebook Home very shortly.

By Adrian Collins

Facebook have held a huge event in the style of Apple to announce the newest addition to their plan for world domination, Facebook Home. The even even came complete with Mark Zuckerberg wearing trademark hoodie, his version of the Steve Jobs polo neck.

While rumours were that they could be making an operating system for the next generation of Android phones, they claim that they have in fact made a much more immersive app, which essentially takes over your home screen.

Of course, it would have been foolish to try to take on the already established Android platform, so taking it over from the inside, taking a leaf out of the Trojan horse playbook, makes much more sense.

Facebook Home will be an incredibly visual way for you to interact with your friends and family, all through Facebook, of course.

Messaging will change to the brilliantly named “Chat Heads”, while your screen is now taken over by your “Cover Feed”. You can probably guess what that is. You’ll be able to interact with most of the apps on your phone through Home, and all your notifications will also appear in Home.

You can flick through statuses, double click to like pictures, videos etc., and hold your finger down to draw all your notifications together and swipe them away for later.

HTC have also come on board to announce that they will make the HTC First, a phone that will be the first (see what they’ve done there?) one to come pre-loaded with Home.

Essentially, Facebook claim they’ve created something that will fit inbetween your Android OS and the apps giving you a way to interact with everything through a Facebook “experience”.

April 12th is the big day for launch of the new app (if it can be called that) on a few select handsets, and Facebook Home will eventually be available on tablets too, but not for a few months yet.