Larry Magid: Facebook Disbands Android Home Team
SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS)— Facebook appears to be giving up on one avenue to dominate your phone. The New York Times reports the company is disbanding the team working on its Facebook Home software.
If you're not familiar with it, Facebook Home is basically a Facebook-dominated phone. They created a version of Facebook deeply embedded in the HTC First phone so that every time you turned on your phone you'd automatically get status updates.
Now they've changed their strategy to focus on apps in order to break up the service. I think they realized that first of all, it was a failure. Second, given all the apps that are out there, Facebook can still be on your phone without being your phone.
In a way I'm glad, because I think Facebook is omnipresent enough in our lives. They haven't totally killed the project, but it's clearly on life support with the disbanding of the teams.
The bottom line is the customers made their vote loud and clear by not liking the product, so they didn't buy it.