Facebook today announced that its new version of Offers with larger images and calls to action are now available on Android.

In February, the social network began testing the new layout on desktop with an option to shop immediately or get a reminder before the promotion ends. The interface also lets users decide if and when to share the offer with friends. We started seeing this on iOS in early April, and the company officially announced it a few weeks later. Now, the product is uniform across desktop and mobile, including Android.

Overall, the new design is likely to increase conversions on Offers posts because of the cleaner design and more prominent buttons to “Get offer” or “Shop now.” The “Remind Me” button available for some retailers working with Facebook directly allows companies to prompt users to redeem their offer at a later date through a notification on Facebook.

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Facebook has begun to roll out its new mobile page layout to Android, a spokesperson from the company tells us.

Two weeks ago the social network debuted a redesign for business and fan pages on iOS, putting more actionable information about a business, brand or personality near the top of the screen. Now the design in reflected in the mobile web version of Facebook and eventually the Android app.

The redesign, with a top row of buttons and a prominent map and recommendations module, better optimizes pages for the mobile use case, for instance, looking up a store’s location or hours, viewing a restaurant’s photos or checking reviews. Options to Like, call, share or check into a place are easy to access. Instead of having to click to view a map, users can see the map, address and hours immediately. Place ratings are now visible on mobile location pages and a few recommendations can be read without having to click and load a new screen. A photos section allows users to quickly swipe through images, as they can in the mobile News Feed.

Page owners can now easily switch between the admin view and public view, which is a useful new feature. They can also pin one post to appear near the top of the screen, but they have to take this action from desktop. Facebook has eliminated the standalone sections for events, videos and photo albums. However, these will continue to show in the Timeline stream when they are posted, and one can be pinned to the top if desired.

Page owners should also keep in mind how the new design affects their cover photo since it will be darkened and the page name, description and profile photo will appear on top of it.

Facebook today announced an update for its Android homescreen experience Facebook Home to address performance and stability. Facebook also revealed at a press event at its headquarters today that in four weeks since the launch of Home on April 12, Home increased user engagement by more than 25 percent compared to the standard Facebook app.

Facebook measures engagement through two areas — feedback such as commenting and liking, and time spent in the app. Facebook director of mobile engineering Cory Ondrejka adds that Facebook Home, with its Chat Heads feature, has also increased the use of messaging. He says participation, which is how many users are actually using Messenger, saw a 7 percent lift, while the total volume of messages sent was up 10 percent.

Facebook plans to update Home on a monthly basis with the latest update arriving today, and future updates landing on June 9 and July 11.

Ondrejka revealed that Facebook Home has nearly reached the one million downloads mark. He adds that, for the amount of devices Home is compatible for, one million downloads was within Facebook’s expectations for Home in this time frame.

Facebook also addressed issues users have experienced with Home, including the lack of folder and doc support as well as a more intuitive way to initiate a discussion with Chat Heads. In a future update within in the next couple of months, users will be able to slide up as they normally would to bring up their apps — as seen to the right — but instead of a small pane with apps, it will be a full screen of apps set in a translucent background with folder support.

For Chat Heads, users will soon be able to drag their profile picture to the left, which will initiate the messenger list to drop down from the left. As for widgets support, Facebook is looking into it, but didn’t reveal any specific plans to integrate it. (more…)

Jim Breyer to leave Facebook board – Accel Partners venture capitalist Jim Breyer announced today that he is stepping down from Facebook’s board of directors in June after holding a seat since April 2005. Breyer was recently elected to the Harvard University Corporation Board. He also sits on the boards of Brightcove, Dell, News Corporation and Walmart. Facebook’s current board lineup includes Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen, Erskine Bowles, Susan Desmond-Hellmann, Don Graham, Reed Hastings and Peter Thiel.

New Facebook data center coming to Iowa – Facebook this week announced plans for a new data center in Altoona, Iowa. Altoona will be the company’s fourth owned and operated data center. Its others are in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; and Luleå, Sweden. The facility will feature its Open Compute Project server designs, outdoor-air cooling system and other innovations to be more energy efficient. Facebook says it plans to break ground this summer and begin serving user traffic in 2014.

Stickers come to Messenger for Android – Facebook updated its Messenger for Android app this week to include support for the new stickers in chat. Stickers are larger emoji that are popular in Asian messaging apps like Line, KakaoTalk and WeChat. Facebook offers a number of sticker sets, which are available for free download from its mobile Sticker Store. This feature came to the main Facebook for iOS app last week, but it is not yet available for the main Android app or Messenger for iOS.

Facebook Home passes 500K installs – According to the Google Play Store, Facebook Home was download more than 500,000 times in the week since it launched. So far the app has only a two-star rating.

Facebook tries new image format – Facebook is testing a new WebP image format, which could make the site faster and reduce network costs, according to CNet. Now, when users upload JPEG images, Facebook converts them to WebP and delivers them this way to people using browsers like Chrome and Opera, which support the format. WebP, however, is not always compatible outside of the web, which means it is harder for users to download and share images they get from Facebook.

Facebook video ad units could come with TV price tags – Facebook is reportedly prepping to sell its new video ads with an “upfront”-type marketplace and TV-like prices. According to AdAge, Facebook will have four daily summer slots — women over 30, women under 30, men over 30 and men over 30 — with an asking price close to $1 million. The exact ad format hasn’t been locked down, but it is believed that the videos will be 15-seconds long and users will see no more than three per day at launch. It is unclear whether the ads will autoplay in the feed or not.

More Messenger for Android users get free calling - Facebook this week released an update for its Messenger app on Android, bringing free VoiP calling to users in the U.S. and 23 other countries. Previously, this was in testing with Android users in Canada and iOS users in several countries. From Messenger, users can tap the “i” button inside a conversation and then select “Free Call.”
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The HTC First, a smartphone preloaded with Facebook Home, is now for sale from AT&T. Facebook also updated Messenger for Android to include support for Chat Heads, the feature debuted with Home last week. Home is expected to be available from the Google Play store later today.

Home is an Android homescreen experience that more deeply integrates the social network’s features into Android devices. It essentially eliminates the “lockscreen” as most people know it. Instead of displaying the time and perhaps some notifications, the screen fills with photos and updates from a user’s Facebook friends. Facebook calls this Cover Feed. Users can watch updates pan by slowly or quickly swipe through them manually. It’s possible to Like or comment on posts from this view.

We’ve been using Facebook Home for the past few days, and Cover Feed definitely feels like a better way to browse the latest posts from friends and pages. Switching back to the standard vertical scrolling feed with small images and text in the main Facebook app ends up being disappointing.

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Facebook addresses privacy questions about Home – Facebook today shared its answers to common privacy questions users might have about Home, the social network’s latest development for Android. Home is optional software that makes Facebook features more integrated into a user’s device. The company says it does not have any of a user’s privacy settings and that all data collected by the service is covered by Facebook’s existing Data Use Policy. Home collects information about how people use the service, such as whether they Like a photo, send a message or launch an app. That information is stored for 90 days in order for Facebook to understand how people are responding to the app and how it could be improved. Facebook says Home does not treat location information any differently than the existing Facebook app. Users can also turn off location services completely. More about Home and privacy is available here.

Facebook stock up after Home announcement – Facebook shares closed at $27.39 this week, up 7 percent since Monday. The stock hasn’t been above $27 per share since March 14. Shares fell beneath $26 earlier in the week as rumors swirled about whether Facebook was launching its own phone or developing a modified version of Android. Wall Street seemed pleased with the company’s decision to release software that could run on a number of devices to make them more social, while also partnering with HTC, AT&T and others to ensure that Home comes preloaded on some new phones.

Facebook, Gates Foundation to sponsor hackathon - Facebook and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are partnering to organize HackEd, two hackathon events this month to address problems in education. Developers will build Facebook-integrated tools for “social learning,” “out-of-school study” and “college-going.” One event will be at Facebook HQ in California April 9. The other will be its London offices April 24. Winners could take home up to $5,000. This is the second year Facebook and the Gates Foundation have put on this event. Last year it was in California only.

Facebook open sources benchmarking tool – Facebook this week released LinkBench, an open source tool for benchmarking graph databases. LinkBench allows developers to replicate the data model, graph structure and request mix of Facebook’s own MySQL workload, while being customizable and extensible for their specific needs. Tim Armstrong, computer science PhD candidate who led the project during an internship at Facebook, said, “We also believe that the broader community working on databases and social applications can benefit from a realistic benchmark for storage and retrieval of social network and other graph-structured data. These applications place many unique demands on database infrastructure due to rapid growth, large volumes of data, and rich data models, yet there are few benchmarks that test performance for these workloads.” LinkBench is available on GitHub.

One significant component of Facebook Home for Android is that it pulls visual content from News Feed onto the lockscreen of a user’s device so they can browse stories from friends and interact with them without first visiting the homescreen and opening the Facebook app.

The idea of fullscreen photos automatically scrolling across a user’s device this way is particularly interesting for advertisers.

Sponsored content won’t appear in this “cover feed” right away, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg says it could at some point. Some of Facebook’s clients and developers were told ads would appear here “soon.”

Posts from pages users Like are already eligible for cover feed. It’s likely that Facebook could open inventory for Page Post Ads and Sponsored Stories after Home gets some strong adoption and the company sees how users interact with content they see here. It doesn’t make sense to sell ad space in Home until there is a meaningful population to reach and Facebook better understands how people use it.
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Facebook today announced Home, a redesigned experience for Android, which brings users’ friends to the forefront of their smartphones.

Home will be available for select Android devices at first, but will roll out to others over time as an optional downloadable application from Google Play. We got a hands-on trial of Home today at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, Calif.

Home is what is known as a “launcher” or “homescreen replacement,” software that presents the main view of a device and lets users access other apps or widgets. There are dozens of third-party Android launchers available from other smaller developers. Facebook’s Home brings parts of a user’s News Feed, messages and notifications to the lockscreen. Users can Like or comment on stories, and respond to messages without leaving the screen they’re on or opening another app. Facebook says its goal was to design from the perspective of “people first” instead of apps first. However, the familiar Facebook for Android, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and any other app users download are accessible just as they would be on a device without Home.

Here we’ll explain the main components of Home. Overall, it’s a slick user experience that deeply integrates the social network without being particularly Facebook-branded. However, for people who don’t use Facebook Messenger much or do not like having their personal messages and notifications displayed on their lockscreen, Home might not be as popular.
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HTC today revealed the HTC First, the first Android smartphone that comes with Facebook Home pre-installed on the device.

With Facebook Home pre-installed on the HTC First, users can get all the experiences from the new Facebook Home app, such as cover feed and chat heads. But the HTC First packs some exclusive Facebook Home functionality that the app won’t have like the ability to feed in email and calendar notifications to the home screen.

“It’s a great opportunity to bring mobile and social together,” said HTC CEO Peter Chou at the event today held at Facebook’s headquarters.

Instead of building the mythical Facebook phone or its own mobile operating system, Facebook decided to partner with mobile device manufacturer HTC, and build an Android app that functions as a home screen replacement, without the need to fork or modify the Android OS.

“Android was designed from the ground up to support these deep integrations,” said Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. Zuckerberg also revealed the Facebook Home Program for all original equipment manufacturers of Android devices, so in the future, more and more Android manufacturers could potentially design devices like the HTC First, with Facebook Home pre-loaded as the default home screen.

The HTC First will be available exclusively from AT&T on April 12 for $99.99, with four color choices including red, light blue, white and black. Pre-ordering for the HTC First begins today.