Facebook Home: Some friendly suggestions for business mobile apps

People may have all kinds of things as the screensavers on their mobile phones – family photos, vacation pictures, work stuff – but for many of us, the first site or app we probably check out is Facebook. In that sense, Facebook is already “Home” on our smartphones, whether we use an Android device or not.

As the social networking service attempts to deepen its already entrenched market position in the mobile space, companies around the world should take a close look at the strategic approach being taken here, and keep it in mind as they begin to further develop their own mobile software for employees and customers. On Thursday, Facebook announced Facebook Home, a series of apps which will be available on selected devices from HTC and Samsung that optimize the use of Facebook’s various sharing tools for mobile users. The emphasis here was clear: the apps should be focused entirely on people, and how they can improve their lives, not the other way around.

"We're not building a phone and we're not building an operating system,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the live stream of the event, putting to rest myriad rumours about a piece of possibly blue hardware going up against the iPhone 5 and BlackBerry Z10.

This is the first takeaway for business leaders. Don’t try to recreate something that’s already popular with consumers. Build something that layers on top of what’s popular so you can be where the biggest audience is now.

I constantly hear IT executives talk about building their own “internal Facebook,” for example, when they’d probably be better off simply deploying a corporate messaging tool like Microsoft’s Yammer and customizing it for their particular business.

The people-first approach to Facebook Home includes the ability to tap on a picture of a person’s face to enter into the “ChatHeads” messaging app. Double-tap on a post and immediately comment on it. Content will often be ever-present in the background and immediately available with a simple swipe.

Contrast this with most corporate mobile apps today, which typically deploy arcane drop-down menus that harken back to the desktop web experience, or require logging in multiple times within the same online session. There’s authentication and then there’s simply user frustration. Facebook Home is trying to avoid that, and so should its business peers.

There will no doubt be groans from some tech-obsessed people about the fact that Facebook Home is coming to phones first and tablets second, but that simply reflects good business judgment. Prioritize according to where the audience is today, and leave tomorrow for tomorrow. This is the reason why so many enterprise mobile initiatives stall: companies trying to do too much at once instead of getting one thing right first.

"Facebook has created a truly unique experience,” said Harry Chou, CEO of handset maker HTC, during the webcast. But it shouldn’t be unique, at least not for long. As the momentum around mobile technology continues to change the way businesses operate, there will be many firms searching for a user interface and features that will keep users immersed in their corporate or consumer mobile portal. Most of them will fail, because they fail to recognize the standards as they emerge. If you’re looking for a successful template, stop looking. You’re already home.