Comment by bpatrianakos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bpatrianakos | Hacker News Reader

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All this criticism of Facebook home is kind of ridiculous. It's basically preaching to the choir. What I hear when I've read almost all of the recent criticisms is "Don't use Facebook Home if you don't like the whole point of Facebook Home". Well, duh!

Facebook Home is for people who live on Facebook. It doesn't pretend to be anything different. If you're a Facebook fiend you'll love this. If you read HN you'll love to hate it. This software is not bad. It just doesn't suit the purposes of people who, well, have a different use-case in mind for their phone than the people who would like Home do.

I'd like to see more reviews that are aimed at those who would actually want to use this software. At this point all we get is "hey, people who would never like this thing, you shouldn't use it and hey let's have fun hating on it". I wouldn't use it. I agree with the article completely but my problem is that the point of the article is irrelevant. Instead there should be balanced reviews that weigh the pros and cons of this software for the audience it's aimed at.

This is like going to GNU conference and reviewing Windows as an OS you wouldn't like and shouldn't use.

Not sure if you read the article, but it did spend a good while focusing on why people who like Facebook may not like it: in particular it is missing a good number of features we're used to in Facebook. For example, I can watch videos in the Facebook app, but not Facebook home (a little strange). Similarly, you can't share webpages, etc. His whole thesis was that it took over too much of the phone while simultaneously not providing enough Facebook features. Seems like a fair criticism to me.

His main thesis focuses far more on why people who don't live in Facebook wouldn't like this ("it took over too much of the phone") than why people who like Facebook will like it. The mention of features Facebook fans would love was really more of an afterthought than the point. It was like saying "all this stuff sucks but I guess it'd be cool if you love Facebook". Articles like this always seem to be written by someone who doesn't understand the audience of the product.

"So while Home offers more of Facebook than you’re likely to want, it gives you fewer ways of interacting with the social network than you probably would like." (emphasis mine)

Written like exactly the kind of person I'm describing. I think if it were fair criticism then it would focus more on how engrossing and mesmerizing the author says it is and of course then mention some of its lacking features. If you take out all the love-to-hate-it parts it'd end up being a fairly positive review of the product.

And please don't do that, the "not sure if you read the article" thing. I didn't come away with the same message as you but I read it.

That's wrong, you totally can share web pages to Facebook from Chrome. Just press the "Share..." option and select Facebook.

You can update and improve software after the initial launch. Who knew!

In other words, you'd like people to review how well the software fulfills its intended purpose. Which tends to be a pretty good way to judge software -- judge the purpose separately, or let people judge it for themselves, as they will anyway.

Makes sense. Zynga makes so much money from their "whales", the people who spend way more than the general users, that they even design for them to a degree. It could make sense for Facebook to design a product for their power users.

Zynga makes its money off "whales" because it's a freemium model, where heavy users pay for extra functionality. Facebook has an advertising model, where they basically get paid for "unique users". So once a user views more than a few pages of ads a day, the marginal value probably starts to decline for them.

Ultimately, he's writing the story for the Seattle Times readers, not hard-core Facebook users.

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