Despite the fact no one in the world needs to waste any more time on Facebook than they already do, the social media giant has found yet another way to completely take over one’s social life.

Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook Home as an application that essentially merges the site with one’s mobile and becomes an Android phone’s home screen. You don’t even have to unlock the screen to see messages or interactions from your friends.

The interface would help lessen the time it takes to open the application and read notifications, and features a “coverfeed” that transforms the phone’s start page. One of the ways Facebook is seeking to humanize the interface is the “Chat Heads” feature, which means you’ll see profile pictures floating around the screen whenever someone messages you.

The idea was to create a phone that focused around people, but instead, Facebook is ignoring the reality that a phone is still driving a hand-held wedge between human beings. A product like this only makes it more impossible to escape from the world of social networking long enough to actually, well, socialize.

While humanity may be losing out again on this one, it is still a smart business move for Facebook. By creating an interface that brings Facebook messages and pictures to the forefront of one’s social life, the company might actually succeed in dominating other mediums of communication. This might result in Facebook undercutting telecommunication companies as people use their messaging services regularly, instead of texting.

Facebook Home will also help the company retain the teenage market that’s growing bored with the site and turning to more creative platforms now that their parents and grandparents have profiles.

The company acknowledged in its 10K report to the Security and Exchange Commission in February that photo-sharing platforms like Instagram are more popular with the younger demographic. Facebook Home is hoping to create a richer visual experience to capitalize on this trend.

Facebook officials are accelerating the pace of communications in order to keep up with the social media landscape that demands instant interaction. But for users like me who are suffering from Facebook fatigue, not being able to log out of the site to have a moment of silence might send our collective stress levels into the red zone.

These developments also make it easier for Facebook to get a hold of and eat up all of someone’s user data if he or she is always logged in. But let’s face it — the majority of users just don’t care. Facebook is a way of life.
There have been rumors brewing about Facebook’s move into mobile for a while. But because the company waited, it can now market to more than 1 billion users. This means, instead of having to sell to a specific demographic, the company can target a whole smattering of people who love Facebook enough to use it all of the time.

Facebook Home might not be a revolutionary piece of technology. It is, as Mat Honan from Wired Magazine called it, another “triumph of mediocrity.” But that kind of popular simplicity is what made the company so successful in the first place.

By reducing the load time it takes to access all of the events that would have made it to your news feed, Facebook is really just taking the next small step toward user singularity. It might seem ridiculous now, but that doesn’t mean people won’t use it.

Kat Smith is a senior creative advertising major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at [email protected], on Twitter at @WhateverKat or by telepathy, if possible.

 

 

Published on April 11, 2013 at 1:02 am