Feeling at Home with Facebook

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To keep up with the ever-evolving social media needs and technology (and also to ensure it doesn't die a slow death like the once popular Orkut), Facebook has always done its fair bit of innovations. This time around, the social networking giant has introduced Facebook Home - a new home screen for Android phones, which will integrate the Facebook experience into the other functions on a device.

Fresh Homescreen
Once Home is downloaded onto your phone, the phone’s home screen, called Cover Feed, displays a never-ending stream of your friends’ status messages and photos. For those messages, which are posted without an accompanying picture, your friends’ Cover Photo to use as the background in the Cover Feed. However, there’s no way to disable a specific friend from showing up in the Cover Feed display currently. Suppose you’re friends with someone who takes pictures that are usually harsh on the eyes, there’s always the risk of those pictures showing up, that too in large form.
Double tapping on the Cover Feed lets you like a photo, and buttons at the bottom of the screen allow you to leave comments on them. Traditional notifications show up in the center of the screen, which can either be dismissed by swiping it or launching the app to read it by tapping on it.

Profile Picture As Unlock Button
Facebook Home uses a person’s Facebook profile picture as the lock button. Swiping a finger up from a user’s face will bring up an app menu, giving quick-access buttons for adding a status message, photo, or checking–in. Swiping instead to the right on your profile picture will bring up the least app you were using, be it Facebook, Chrome, or anything else, and swiping to the left will bring up Facebook Messenger.

Chat Bubbles
One of the most interesting features is Chat Heads. When a receive a friend’s message either through SMS or Facebook Messenger, their head shows up on the screen as a notification in a tiny, movable bubble. Tapping on the bubble will launch the conversation with that person, and dragging the Chat head down to the bottom of the screen will dismiss it. The bubble can be placed anywhere on the screen for reading it later.

Availability
Facebook Home will be available in the Google Play Store starting April 12, but only on selected devices as of now - HTC’s One X, One X+, Samsung’s Galaxy S III and 4 – as well as the HTC First, a phone that will come pre-installed with Home.