cross pond high tech

Mark  Zuckerberg swore his team wasn't making a Facebook  phone. But today, he greeted a room full of press in Menlo Park with a different  message.

"Today we're finally going to talk about that Facebook phone," the social  network's CEO said.

But by "Facebook phone," Zuckerberg doesn't mean actual hardware. Instead his  team created Home, a concept that changes the "soul of the phone," the home  screen.

"What would it feel like if our phones were designed around people, not  apps?" Zuckerberg asked the audience.

"We're not building a  phone. We're not building a new MP3 player. And we're not building a new  internet communication device," Zuckerberg said.

Instead, Facebook Home  appears the moment you turn on your phone or wake it up from stand-by mode  (Zuckerberg says people turn on their phones an average of 100 times per day).

Facebook Home doesn't  display the typical static background photo. It shows story after story posted  by friends to Facebook or Instagram  in real-time. It displays status updates, photos, and other open graph stories  with large images.

Below is a graphic that  simply explains what Facebook Home is. It's an integration on top of Android's  Operating System but beneath the app icon layer we're all used to seeing on our  smart phones.

Facebook has built the  first home screen that comes to life, and updates in real time.

During the past five years, the ability to register and log in on websites with a social network or email identity has become increasingly prevalent. In fact, 90% of people have encountered social login before, and more than half of people use it. Because it makes the account creation and login process so much faster and easier and eliminates the need to remember yet another username and password, it’s no surprise that social login has become so popular.

But which networks are people most likely to choose? How do these preferences differ based on the type of sites people visit? We all use multiple social networks for different purposes. Facebook is generally where we interact with our close friends and family. LinkedIn is where we maintain our professional persona. Google+ lets us do both, by letting us organize our social graph and content we share into circles. We use Twitter to follow influencers, share opinions, and read about topics of interest. And Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft are our primary means of privately communicating with others via email.

For four years, Janrain has published quarterly reports to shed light on consumer preferences for social login, with data aggregated from the websites that use Janrain. The key takeaway, above all else, is that people want choice. In other words, there is not a single identity provider to rule them all.