“With Home, everything on your phone gets friendlier.”
Being a high school student puts me in something of a weird place to critique Facebook Home. There will always be people to talk through Facebook Messenger (it’s an auxiliary activity for my FB friends). But from what I saw of Facebook’s event, this demographic wasn't specifically discussed. I don’t know why they would, seeing that interaction from this group is dwindling - which is the truth, all the chatter has moved to Instagram, Tumblr, taking “selfies” and making GIFs.
Conceptually, Facebook Home brings me back to the days of the Microsoft Kin, a Windows CE-run feature phone predicated on sharing “Your passions, happy accidents and triumphs.” It included a software feature called Loop, which served as an aggregator for your social feeds (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Etc.) It isn't the Kin’s messy software that is so reminiscent of Facebook Home’s essence (if anything, it has more in common with HTC’s BlinkFeed), but the ads’ (which ironically, featured the song “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes) intense focus on selling a very specific, focused image and experience -one not representative of that of the majority of Facebook’s users.
In this advertisement for the Kin, we are presented with a scrawny, hoodie-wearing, curly-haired Eisenbergian young man eagerly hopping into his friend’s car with a shoe box He seems distressed. As he and his group of bubble-blowing friends drive down the highway, the song “Wonderin” by Nicole Reynolds plays - the lyrics are tipping us, viewers, off to a plot point. He’s Tweeting “When one door closes another opens. Goodbye heartache.” We see a shot of him and his scraggly hair waving out of a rolled-down windows (a staple of this type of commercial). His arm is around another girl - one of his friends perhaps? - and they are using his Kin, laughing, smiling, enjoying the moment.
Next, we see the group in a field, an orchard of some type. Eating oranges - presumably stolen, again, laughing at the existence of each others’ company. We’re back in the car, and see that beaten up ’ol shoebox, one of the friends fingers through its contents - pictures of a girl. Most likely the cause of our hero’s heartbreak. The friends pull into the beach, running into the sunset. There’s a dramatic shot where Mr. Protagonist looks down the line of his two friends, nodding slightly as if to say “it’s time”, “let go of her”. It looks as if they’ve set up a bonfire, and as we see the shoebox’s contents unloaded and ready to burn, friend #2 is recording this moment on a Kin, really capturing the emotional significance of this action. It’s ceremonious, ritualistic. And now that those paltry memories are burning, they are appropriately sending them out to the variety of social services us teenagers inhabit. Their silhouettes dance around the remains of their bonfire. Kin.
That Kin commercial a prototypical example of mobile devices being marketed extensively to young people, selling an enviable experience. Stylistically, it and this Facebook Home ad hit very similar - albeit kitschy - notes, but like some of the demographic Facebook’s advertising is hoping to retain - a group whose digital experiences are extremely varied - its messaging feels flawed. I doubt that I am the target audience here, but who is? It certainly isn't my mother, who is an avid Facebook user, but she relies so heavily on the familiarity and consistency of Samsung’s TouchWiz that having to learn that her handful of apps are not where they should be, and how and where she can find them again. That even installing Facebook Home on her phone would be useless.
It certainly isn't for my niece, who after a two-year stint as leader of a relatively popular Justin Bieber Facebook group and advocate for Belieberism, who has since relinquished her power and stepped down from Facebook in general. She primarily lives in Tumblr now, where she along with her friends aren’t trapped within the confines of Facebook’s seemingly minimal ‘Post a picture, write a status update or like stuff’ functionality.
(we both agreed that a Home-like app would be better suited to Tumblr’s more image-heavy feed, but the amount of unwanted porn that manages to find its way into our Dashboards would make it far too dangerous to be left alone)
In both cases, Home fails because it puts emphasis on the least important part of the connection - the connector: Facebook.
Home isn’t just Home, an app where you can see a feed of your friends’ updates. Home is Facebook Home, an app that lets you live inside a house that your friends have left, and whose parents, abandoned fan groups and product pages have taken their place. It’s usefulness has been relagated to getting people’s attention (an organizational tool), because most likely everyone you know is vested in Facebook one way or another
I really like Home. I like how it feels, and how it looks. But every time I use it - and show it to friends, I’m reminded just how seemingly out of touch Facebook feels. I’m surrounded by it’s iconography, and inundated by its lingo. It’s a somber reminder of what Facebook was - and still is, just not for me. Without friends to inhabit it, Facebook Home is useless.
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