Facebook Home Phone to Have Ads
MENLO PARK, Calif. - This morning Facebook revealed all about its plan for mobile domination. Its Home software, which runs on top of Android, will allow people with Android phones to turn their devices into Facebook phones. The software has a number of features like a Cover Feed, which brings in photos and items from your Newsfeed right to the main screen, and Chat Heads, which allows you to chat with friends in any app.
But one Facebook staple isn't in the software - advertisements. Or at least not yet.
During the press Q&A following the event, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that Home would not launch with ads, but advertisements would be integrated at a later date.
So how will the advertisements appear on your phone? They'll likely be part of the Cover Feed, Facebook's Adam Mosseri, the lead product designer on Home, told ABC News in an interview. The Cover Feed replaces your main homescreen with updates from your Newsfeed.
"They [advertisements] will probably look like other Cover Feed stories," Mosseri said. "They would have to look and feel like the other stories. We want the experience to be seamless, and it would have to meet that same sort of quality bar." When asked if you could wake up and see an ad on your phone, he said, "I'm not sure we would do it as the first page, but you could keep swiping, like with any story you weren't interested in."
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Mosseri also said that Facebook wouldn't be collecting any more additional information from Home. "It's the same as using Facebook now or using iOS or Android apps. All software makers track and have analytics about how people use the products so they can understand that and can make good decisions," he said.
Mosseri said that the data they do track wasn't tied directly to people (it is anonymous) and the data were gathered only from a portion of the people using the app or product.
"We know people are sensitive about their data, we are respectful in a number of ways. We anonomize it over a short period of time. We also only do analytics on a small subset of the population," Mosseri explained.
Facebook Home will be available for download next Friday, April 12, through Google Play. It will only work at first on a select number of phones, including the Galaxy S3 and HTC's One. HTC and AT&T will launch the HTC First that same day, which is the first phone to run the software out of the box.