Facebook Home. What Is It?

I awoke this morning in my home, flapped my hand around for my iPhone, opened up one eye, and began reading Facebook. It was filled with stories about Facebook Home - the newest offering from the giant company. According to online reports, it is essentially a screensaver for Android phones.

Mashable says it's a really nice interactive mobile screensaver, to be sure. One that shows you status updates from your News Feed when the phone is ostensibly turned off as well as in your home screen. A screensaver with a built-in chat app. Calling it a screensaver doesn't necessarily diminish its ability to grab your attention, which is the coin of Facebook's realm. Screensavers can grab a lot of real estate in your brain.The updates are all based on the News Feed algorithm; it's anything you'd see there that has pictures attached. Brands, relax: your updates will show up in Home the way they show up in News Feed, so long as they're visually interesting.The pictures float around the screen. You can't stop them floating. That's the screensaver part. You double-tap on a picture to like it. That's the interactive part.And then, of course, there's chat heads. (That's how Facebook insists you spell it: two words, lowercase.) This has to be one of the more interesting name choices for a smartphone feature in recent years. Time will tell whether it's a smart choice or a target for mockery, or both.Chat heads pop up like system notifications, but on the side of your phone. As strange as the name is, it does what it says on the box: allows you to chat with the disembodied heads of your friends. Check out the article here by Mashable for their opinion on Chat v iMessage.