Today, Facebook launched their new "Home" experience and the HTC First. Conceptually, the Android home screen replacement seems like a fantastic idea-- it places bright, large photos on your lock screen that can be swiped through when you have a free moment, and focuses on your friends.
But, there's a fundamental issue with placing user generated content on your home screen.
Your Facebook Home experience, like the website itself, is solely determined by your friends' activity.
But, unlike the website, you carry this experience around with you front and center.
Facebook portrays this experience as emotional, with your friends' best moments slowly panning by on your lock screen. Their marketing page is filled with "perfect" lives and people, sharing only beautiful, colorful pictures.
The problem is, a lot of my Facebook friends don't post pictures like that. Thanks to some of the trouble makers who don't have an internal sense of what content is appropriate for Facebook, my experience would have gone something like this:
My boss asks me a question about my schedule, I pull out my phone. He comments on one of the pictures scrolling by-- it's one of my friends with her dog. A second later, the photo changes-- it's a picture of the inside of a toilet bowl, after someone... *ahem* already "used" it, with the poster bragging about what he "gave birth to today."
Sorry, Facebook, but until my friends can figure out what's appropriate to put online (I'd give it until after college when they are all searching for jobs at companies that do Facebook profile checks), user posted content is staying off my lock screen where everyone can catch a glimpse of it.
Note: the photos I described are completely true (I hid the toilet one after scrolling by it briefly), but the scenario is fictional to illustrate what might have happened if this was on my lock screen at work