When I donned the blue shirt of the Apple Store specialist not so long ago, one question came up an awful lot from customers. Whether they were deciding between MacBooks and iMacs, or trying to understand why they might want an iPad or iPhone, hardly a day went by that I wasn’t asked this question:
“Can I do Facebook on this?”
That’s who Facebook Home is for. For the many, many people who walk into a wireless carrier’s store and ask for it they have a phone they can “do Facebook” on, the answer will be, why yes, yes we do.
Near-Earth Object 
Recently I attended a panel on doing business in Africa. One gentleman on the panel ran a business in Tanzania, where he said almost everyone uses their mobile device to access the internet and handle finances. However, if you asked most people if they used the internet, they would say no. Follow that up with Facebook, and they would say yes.
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The idea of Facebook in my face at this level is appalling to me and I think to most people that are tech savvy and likely prefer twitter.
I do think the people you describe will find home confusing and will be put off by it. Flicking around chatheads to achieve different actions seems like a mess. The app experience is more organized and closer to the browser experience that low expertise people are used too.
I hope I am right or we are all doomed.
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You might be right, but from a pure sales perspective, I think its overall cutesiness might be enough to land a sale of a device with home baked in for the low information buyer.
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I’m a bit of a techie and I prefer Facebook to Twitter for two reasons alone:
1) The members of my overseas family who I want to associate with regularly are all non-techie and use Facebook.
2) I don’t trust myself to censor myself properly if I can just say anything I damn well please whenever I damn well please. 🙂
Truthfully I’d rather get along without either, just like I’d like my cell phone number to be regenerated every few minutes so I can still use it for emergencies but nobody can call me.
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I don’t have a cell phone. But if I did, I would avoid receiving calls by turning it off. It would only be on when I want to call out. Wouldn’t that work for you? Couldn’t you capture incoming calls with voicemail, and then call back whomever you want at a time of your own choosing?
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Truly spoken like a man without a cell phone 😛
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But…but…I have a cell phone, and I use it exactly as Scr… Archivist describes. Because really, I do hate phone calls. They’re largely unnecessary except in specific circumstances, in which case, I turn on the phone.
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