Brief Thoughts On The Rollout Of Facebook “Home”

Earlier this week, I was helping a friend think through his post on Facebook’s recent ads for “Facebook Home.” He’s an early employee and investor, and the TV ads seemed to bother him. In our email conversation, I shared my brief view of Facebook Home overall, from concept to TV spots, and he suggested that I share them. So, I have reproduced them below, slightly cleaned up from our email change.

How I Think About “Facebook Home.”

• From a technical standpoint: It’s brilliant. They have reinvented “what is an app?” from the ground up.
• From an execution standpoint: It’s brilliant. It’s not easy to pull off a v1 like this, and they made the right move.
• From a strategic standpoint: It’s great. One carrier and handset to let them iron out any kinks, after which they can choose to move accordingly.
• From a product point-of-view: Hmmm….I’m not sure I’d want “Home,” but more importantly, the younger demographic seems to shun the idea of permanence, the web, and Facebook altogether.
• Analyzing positioning during launch: It was OK. Not bad. They got their overall point across.
• TV commercials: A pure disaster. They’re off-key. not cool. too weird. potentially ruin brand further. It’s a tone-deaf mistake that allows the chattering classes to easily point to how out of touch FB may actually be.