Facebook Home

Facebook's new Home on Android smartphone is an audacious attempt to demote the OS to a utility role, to keep to itself user data Android was supposed to feed into Google's advertising business. Google's reaction will be worth watching.


(The company's slick presentation is here. Business Insider's also provides a helpful gallery.)
Zuckerberg's new creation is the latest instance of the noble pursuit of making the user's life easier by wrapping a shell around existing software. Creating a shell isn't a shallow endeavor; Windows started its life as a GUI shell wrapped around MS-DOS. Even venerable Unix command line interfaces such as, and Bash (which can be found inside OS X) are user-friendly – or "somewhat friendlier" – wrappers around the Unix kernel. (Sometimes this noble pursuit is taken too far – remember Microsoft's? It was the source of many jokes.)
Facebook Home is a shell wrapped around Android; it's a software layer that sits on top of everything else on your smartphone. Your Facebook friends, your timeline, conversations, everything is in one place. It also gives you a simple, clean way to get to other applications should you feel the need to leave the Facebook corral… but the intent is clear: Why would you ever want to leave Home?
This is audacious and clever, everything we've come to expect from the company's founder.
To start with, and contrary to the speculation leading up to the announcement, Facebook didn't unveil a piece of hardware. Why bother with design, manufacture, distribution and support, only to sell a few million devices – a tiny fraction of your one billion users – when you can sneak in and take over a much larger number of Android smartphones at a much smaller cost?
Second, Home is not only well-aligned with Facebook's real business, advertising revenue, it's even more aligned with an important part of the company's business strategy: keeping that revenue out of Google's hands. Android's only raisin Demetre is to attract a captive audience, to offer free services (search, email, maps…) in order to gain access to the users' actions and data, which Google then cashes in by selling eyeballs to advertisers. By "floating" above Android, Home can keep these actions and data to itself, out of Google's reach.