The new software — which users can download to turn their regular Android phones into Facebook phones — was released to the Google Play store in the United States on Friday. Not more than a day has passed, and nearly half of the reviews for the release peg Home with a one-star satisfaction rating (that’s one out of five, the worst you can have).

So my question from a few weeks ago remains: Does anyone actually want a Facebook phone?

Perhaps, or perhaps not (personally, I don’t). But here’s the thing — if you live in the U.S. like I do, Facebook isn’t too worried about how you answer that question. Because this phone isn’t really for us.

Facebook Home is a play for the international market, the developing nations where traditional computer access is spotty, where mobile phones are fast becoming the medium of choice to access the Web, and where carriers are perfectly content charging sky-high data and SMS fees to their customers.

Some of this is clearly obvious. Android is the free, open, mobile OS slapped on partner manufacturer handsets. Because of that, waves of low-cost Android smartphones are invading the rest of the world, with Android holding some 75 percent of global market share, according to some estimates.

And many of those high-volume shipments are directed toward areas with the most growth potential for Facebook. India, for instance, is one of the largest homes to Android users in the entire world, and smartphone shipments to India are increasing sequentially every quarter. Meanwhile, less than 10 percent of the population belongs to Facebook. That’s fertile ground for expansion.

Same with other areas like Africa, Southeast Asia, South America and the Middle East, where Android-based mobile devices are becoming more plentiful by the day.

Facebook’s big pitch here: Free messaging and, eventually, voice calling services. One of the social giant’s biggest pushes over the last year or so has been for its Messenger app, the company’s way of usurping traditional SMS services by allowing Facebook users to send texts, photos, videos and email messages through the service. And last year, we saw the first seeds of Messenger expansion, as Facebook began testing free voice calling services in the U.S. and Canada through Messenger and its official Facebook app.

These are crucial offerings overseas where, unlike the U.S., data and SMS rates are high, and users are forced to pay increasingly large amounts of cash for less time spent on the Web. The more free services that Facebook can offer — like free texting, for example — the better chance it has to increase market share abroad.

That’s what Facebook Home aims to do, slapping Messenger and a never-ending stream of content front and center on the device’s home screen. Right now it’s available to download on a number of Android devices, but I’d imagine that at some point in the future, Facebook will offer a free, subsidized version after sticking ads inside the Cover Feed feature. (Mark my words.)

Here’s Facebook’s big problem: The smaller messaging app players like WhatsApp, Line, KakaoTalk and others are absolutely killing it in terms of market penetration. They, too, offer free messaging services, and each of those companies has a serious customer base — in the hundreds of millions — internationally.

They also have something that Facebook needs to work on — carrier relationships. WhatsApp has partnered with carriers across multiple continents, getting its app pre-installed on phones sold to customers directly out of the box. That’s a huge advantage, and a way to score potential viral sign-ups with every device sold. And the larger these messaging networks grow — all of which do far more than just simple messaging — the more difficult a time Facebook will have trying to break in abroad.

So hate on, haters — stateside users can eschew Facebook Home to their heart’s content. We’re not the ones Facebook is concerned with.

Facebook on Thursday pulled back the curtain on Home, the company’s major push into creating an entirely new Facebook-ized mobile environment for Android users. A lot of ground was covered at the event; content everywhere across Cover Feed and Messaging, new HTC-made hardware in the U.S. and France, even how many Android phones will be able to run Home.

We had a chance to sit down with Adam Mosseri, Facebook Home’s director of product, and pick his brain for a bit more in-depth information on the new product. Here’s what he had to say:

On Cover Feed and Chat Heads, Facebook’s two key features in Home:

The way we think about Cover Feed internally is that people really don’t care about Facebook. They care about the content they can see on Facebook. If your nephew takes his first steps. Or what my grandmother in Pittsburg is doing. I don’t really care about the means — I just care about the content.

So we’ve always tried to put content first, though I think we kind of got away from it over the past couple of years. The site got more and more complicated as we added more products and features. So what you’ve seen us do with this — and also the News Feed redesign a month or so ago — is to try and get back to our roots in terms of values and put that content first.

For messaging, it’s people first, but it’s mostly focused on utility. It does two things really well; it lets you talk while you do something else, and it lets you quickly chat with multiple people at the same time, which no other app does quite the same way. We’re seeing a massive increase in messaging — in our platform and on other platforms as well.

On time spent working on Project Home, and its evolution over time:

I’ve been on the project for about a year, and have been the project manager for the past seven months. The core team working on Home is around 20 to 25 people, but to create Home it required a lot of help from a lot of other teams.

A couple things were happening last year. We had different projects, with different goals, doing different things. At some point in the late summer, we saw that we might be able to pull these things together and make a sort of cohesive system — a sort of suite.

Chat Heads was actually an idea from another team on another project — the Messenger group — while another team was playing around with the Lock Screen, and yet another was working on app launching in general. The core Android team had to do a lot of infrastructure work, performance work and tooling so this could even be possible.

We didn’t really lock down a direction and know exactly what we were doing from a high level until October of 2012. I’ve been here for a while, but it often happens that projects evolve and change over time.

On incorporating ads into Cover Feed:

When we do ads properly, we’ll work with [the ads team]. It’ll be a collaboration. So for example, the designers for Cover Feed will probably design the ad units. Whereas the guys who work on what’s called the auction, figuring out how to price things, that’s going to be another team. But they’ve been seeing things the whole way along.

Literally every week I post an internal note to the entire company about how Home is coming along.

On Facebook Home eventually making it onto iOS:

All of our products influence all of our other products. So our News Feed redesign influenced Home. But you can’t be a lock screen on iOS. You can’t be a home screen on iOS. You can’t draw anything while other apps are running on iOS. So the core bits are just not technically possible.

There are very different constraints in working in iOS, so for instance, there wouldn’t be an app launcher in it. We’d have to rethink a lot of things. But we’ll definitely continue to work with other teams and influence each other.

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The partnership, which includes participation from more than 18 carriers across 14 countries, offers free or discounted cellular data access to people using Facebook’s Messenger application for iOS, Android and Facebook on feature phones.

The story here is the locations Facebook has targeted in its initiative. Participating carriers span multiple continents — including Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America — key to Facebook’s continued growth as it reaches the higher end of U.S. population penetration. Even those who aren’t sure they want to hop on the Facebook train can take advantage of the deal, thanks to Facebook’s “no account, no problem” initiative, which allows people who don’t have a Facebook account to still use Facebook Messenger.

That’s effective for a few reasons. First, the countries this deal targets aren’t necessarily beholden to Facebook in the first place; remember, there are a number of other social networks in the world, and Facebook isn’t the top dog in every country. Give folks more incentive to use Facebook by making it cheaper to do so, and perhaps you’ll convert new users to the network.

Second, and perhaps more important, data plans around the world are far from equal. While we in the U.S. may enjoy our all-you-can-eat bandwidth buffets, much of the world still face limited choice in data plans, and are often forced to pay high prices for relatively small data caps.

Keep in mind that it’s a promotion, not a permanent thing, so the deal will last for anywhere from three months to somewhat longer, depending on the carrier.

But three months may be long enough to coax a skeptical user into becoming a full-on Facebook convert. Especially if Facebook can find a way to expand its free voice-calling beyond just U.S. and Canadian users, and into the hands of the rest of the world.

On the one hand, Mark Zuckerberg’s key line is, “making the world a more open and connected place.” And then we take a look back on the recent past and see a history of what seems to be the exact opposite behavior.

In the past few months, Facebook has cut ties with Voxer, snipped its Instagram functionality with Twitter, immediately cut friend-finding access to Vine, and shut down Yandex’s new social discovery app, Wonder. And that’s just the stuff that has blown up in the news.

I’ve been trying to get Facebook to talk a bit more about its seemingly schizo-effective pattern of enforcing its platform policies; to date, the company has been pretty elusive. Facebook seems to have answered that call on Friday, publishing an update to its developer blog to clarify its platform policies. The key takeaway is the following addendum, excerpted below:

Reciprocity and Replicating core functionality: (a) Reciprocity: Facebook Platform enables developers to build personalized, social experiences via the Graph API and related APIs. If you use any Facebook APIs to build personalized or social experiences, you must also enable people to easily share their experiences back with people on Facebook. (b) Replicating core functionality: You may not use Facebook Platform to promote, or to export user data to, a product or service that replicates a core Facebook product or service without our permission.

Let’s parse that. First, Facebook is totally cool with you using its data to build out your app or business. But Facebook isn’t just one big ball of altruistic joy — if you’re building atop the Facebook platform, Facebook wants a return on its data “investment,” if you will.

What that means: Your user activity should be shareable back to Facebook. (And make it look pretty, while you’re at it.)

Second, and perhaps more important, is the clause about replicating “core” Facebook functionality. Essentially, if you’re a service that steps on Facebook’s toes and what the company is trying to do — and importantly, uses Facebook data to do it — you’re in trouble.

That’s most likely where Voxer got caught up. Take a look at Voxer, the mobile communications service, and see how it correlates with the recent changes in Facebook’s Messenger app — voice, text, calls and the like. Yikes.

It’s possibly the same for Yandex’s new social discovery application, Wonder. It was dangerous territory for Yandex, as the app essentially used Facebook data and translated it into a better mobile discovery experience. And many signs point to Facebook wanting to do the same thing — at least at some point down the line.

Here’s where I have a problem with Facebook’s “core functionality” argument: Voxer and Facebook existed fairly harmoniously — or so we’ve been told by Voxer — for some time. Yet Facebook snipped Voxer’s access after Facebook’s Messenger product began to evolve into what it is today — voice, text and calling.

So what does that mean for a startup building on the platform? Facebook may not be dabbling in your space today, but if the company decides to stomp into your territory, do you face the risk of being cut off? That doesn’t bode well for a company looking to build a future on top of the Facebook platform.

As for Facebook cutting off Vine, well, the policy update doesn’t really address that issue. It’s pretty obvious that it was an anticompetitive move against a Twitter-owned product. And, honestly, it’s retribution for Twitter’s similar actions against Facebook in the past. I don’t think either company has its hands clean in these particular cases.

But, outside of Twitter — which I doubt will ever play nice-nice with Facebook — the question lingers for other startups: What is “core” Facebook product and functionality? How do you know if your product is replicating it? And, if not today, how do you know if your product won’t replicate it tomorrow, when Facebook decides to move into a new product area?

Like I said — platform policy update or no, Facebook is one tough company to read.

Hopefully, developers can read between the lines.

The company will launch an update to its Messenger app for iOS and Android on Thursday afternoon, allowing users to send short voice messages to one another inside of the application, up to a minute in length.

A clever addendum, bringing Messenger up to par with Apple’s iMessage service (which lets users send voice messages via the voice memo app) and BlackBerry Messenger, while giving it a leg up on basic SMS.

Which is really the service with the biggest target on its back. SMS, the 160-character message service ubiquitous in every country, dominates communication across the globe, from developing countries to the so-called “first world.” And all of the big mobile players like Apple, Google and Facebook want in on that sort of communication virality.

That virality is the key to growth, especially in developing countries inside of Africa, South America and Asia that Facebook is targeting as the next major areas of expansion. Find a way to break into those markets through free, easy communication services — like, for example, letting users access Facebook Messenger for Android without the need for a Facebook account — and you’ll find a way to grow your user base from the ground up via word of mouth.

Also particularly noteworthy: In Facebook’s update on Thursday, Canadian users on iOS can start using Messenger to make VOIP calls inside the app. That’s a pretty Skypey, Google Voice-y move by the social giant. I can only assume that if the test takes off in Canada, the next move down the line will be video calling.

In essence, owning the chains of communication is Facebook’s best path to growth. Now that the service has saturated most areas of the developed world, hitting the billion-user mark and seeing its growth curve begin to flatten, Facebook must think differently: What are the ways people communicate with one another outside of Facebook? And how can we own them, too?

Cloning Snapchat was just a drop in the bucket. Expect more in 2013.

Facebook said today that it was launching Poke, an app for the Apple iPhone that AllThingsD.com previously reported was poised to be released to rival the popular Snapchat.

Facebook’s new app to send impermanent messages is standalone and separate from the main Facebook app, bringing its total app count to five. Others include Messenger, Camera and Instagram. Blake Ross, a director of product at Facebook, said Friday that he and a small team built Poke in 12 days.

Poke is a reference to the irritating-to-oldsters-like-me and longtime feature, giving users of the social networking site the ability to “poke” each other to say hello.

In a blog post today, Facebook said:

“With the Poke app, you can poke or send a message, photo, or video to Facebook friends to share what you’re up to in a lightweight way. You can poke an individual friend or several at once. Each message expires after a specific time you’ve set, either 1, 3, 5 or 10 seconds. When time runs out, the message disappears from the app.”

In other words, it’s a feature-for-feature ripoff clone of Snapchat, which is about to need that big round of funding that the start-up is reportedly raising to further grow its self-destructible messaging empire.

As ATD reporter Mike Isaac wrote earlier this week:

Facebook’s new app is another in a string of the company’s aggressive movements into the friend-to-friend communications space.

For instance, Facebook has been highly interested in the fast-growing mobile messaging application WhatsApp (though Facebook isn’t buying WhatsApp, we’ve been told). Two weeks ago, Facebook launched an update to Messenger for Android, where people without a Facebook account can send messages to one another; it was widely seen as a direct, aggressive move into the space WhatsApp currently inhabits.

Photo messages are obviously important to Facebook, as well. It closed the acquisition of mobile photo-sharing app Instagram for $735 million in September (vying aggressively with Twitter, which also wanted to buy the app). Facebook also launched the standalone Facebook Camera app earlier this year, which the company built in-house.

Facebook plans to launch the app in the coming weeks, sources say, sometime before the end of the year.

Like Messenger and Camera, Facebook’s new app is standalone and separate from the main Facebook app. After the launch, this will bring Facebook’s app count up to four individual apps (five, if you count Instagram).

Facebook could not be reached for comment late Sunday evening.

Snapchat rose to prominence over the last year thanks to its capacity for sending private, “self-destructable” messages. A user can send a photo message to another friend inside the service, choosing the amount of time that the photo will be available for viewing (usually a matter of seconds). After the user views the photo message for the allotted amount of time, the photo deletes itself from the sender’s phone and the receiver’s phone, and Snapchat deletes the message from its servers. Snapchat also recently added video message capabilities to its service.

Facebook’s competing app will do much the same thing. After users open the new app, they are presented with a list of current message threads between them and their friends. Hold a finger down on one of the threads, and a timer comes up to ask how long the message should be viewable. From there, users are able to send the message — which, just like on Snapchat, will only be viewable for a fixed period of time.

Facebook’s new app is another in a string of the company’s aggressive movements into the friend-to-friend communications space.

For instance, Facebook has been highly interested in the fast-growing mobile messaging application WhatsApp (though Facebook isn’t buying WhatsApp, we’ve been told). Two weeks ago, Facebook launched an update to Messenger for Android, where people without a Facebook account can send messages to one another; it was widely seen as a direct, aggressive move into the space WhatsApp currently inhabits.

Photo messages are obviously important to Facebook, as well. It closed the acquisition of mobile photo-sharing app Instagram for $735 million in September (vying aggressively with Twitter, which also wanted to buy the app). Facebook also launched the standalone Facebook Camera app earlier this year, which the company built in-house.

The new Facebook app comes on the heels of a potential new round of financing for Snapchat. Last week, Om Malik reported that Benchmark Capital will soon lead an $8 million venture round for Snapchat, at a rumored valuation of $50 million.

“We haven’t heard anything from Mark [Zuckerberg] about a Snapchat clone,” Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel said in an emailed statement on Sunday evening. “We’re big fans of Instagram and the Facebook platform and we look forward to watching Mark continue to innovate and grow his company.”

For any start-up, watching Facebook move deeper into your territory is certainly daunting. But not all of Facebook’s home-grown efforts have killed off the competition. Facebook Questions, for example, was supposed to signal the end of Q&A site Quora. However, Facebook retired its Questions product after it failed to take off.

To put it another way: May the best app win.

Facebook will update its main Android app as well as Facebook Messenger for Android, the company announced Thursday, with an extra emphasis on messages and design in both app updates.

In the main Android app, the ability to message your friends is pushed to the forefront, as Facebook has added a new Messenger button in the upper-right-hand corner of the News Feed, for faster access to see who is available for chatting from within the app. A quick swipe to the left inside of the app again accomplishes much the same thing. Facebook touts that the update will make the app more reliable and secure, with fewer frustrating reboots and bugs.

The main difference, however, is the redesigned interface for conversations. It basically apes Apple’s iOS design for text message conversations. Facebook’s claim is that it’s meant to make it easier for you to tell who’s saying what, as currently all conversation within Messenger is in one News Feed-like stream. Aesthetically, the update makes sense.

But here’s the not-so-subtle subtext: Facebook really, really wants you to use its Messenger products to communicate.

The company has made no bones about the fact that it wants its user base to make the leap from traditional email, SMS and chat services over to Messenger, which essentially rolls the three methods of communication into one. Both friends online at once? Facebook makes Messenger into a live chat session. Not there, but want to send a message? Use it as an SMS-like text to a friend. And with the addition of the @facebook.com extension in 2010, non-Messenger users can email your Messenger account from their own existing email addresses.

The idea, it seems, is to eventually convince users that they don’t need to navigate between multiple platforms — email, SMS, chat clients — to carry out their daily communications among friends and family. That’s what Facebook’s platform is for. And, obviously, the more time people spend inside of Facebook’s platform across all devices — Android, iOS and the Web — the better. Making Messenger a better tool to do that across every device — especially the highly popular Android platform — can only expedite that process.

It got a little weird, however, when Facebook tried to speed that up a few months ago by switching users’ Facebook-assigned email addresses to the default option. While Facebook tried to play it as catering to users’ privacy options, it came off as an ugly reminder that yes, Facebook has all of your personal data, and can decide what it wants to do with it when it wants to.

Anyway, Facebook is obviously trying to learn from that freak-out, introducing the changes to Messenger over time. What’s more, on a handful of the Android phones on which Messenger sees the most use, Facebook lets you SMS-text your contacts directly from the Messenger application, so — let’s say it all together now — you never have to leave Facebook to stay in touch with your friends. How novel.

As an aside, Facebook assures me that it plans to roll out the feature to as many Android devices as it can in the coming months. It just makes sense, in my opinion, to first target those phones which see the most Messenger use.

Facebook probably shouldn’t dilly-dally too much in pushing Messenger hard, however. The company has a plethora of proprietary mobile messaging services to compete with: Apple’s iMessage, BlackBerry’s BBM, Google’s unified Talk, Chat and message features. The more users grow accustomed to a particular method of communication, the harder it will be to break them of the habit and onboard them to Facebook’s system.

In any case, expect the updated Facebook applications to hit the Google Play store beginning Thursday.

Oh, and by the by, Facebook didn’t give Android its day in the sun alone on Thursday; the company’s iOS apps also received an update, timed with the release of iOS 6 to the public.

Well, it wasn’t as tasty as free food this week at Yahoo, but in her second official all-hands meeting with employees — now reportedly called “Friday FYI” — new CEO Marissa Mayer rolled out another new Google-inspired Q&A tool to get the company talking about what matters.

The system allows anyone at the Silicon Valley Internet giant to post questions, ideas or suggestions on a variety of topics, which can then be voted up and down.

Actually, it’s been in use internally at — you guessed it — Google for some time, and is even available to the general public in a product called Google Moderator. Mayer has been importing a lot of corporate practices from the search giant where she worked for her entire career — from free food to better swag to these weekly confabs to, now, its method of hearing from the staff.

While Yahoo previously used its Messenger product to garner questions for its less-regular all-hands meetings, this is apparently a new interactive tool built by the company’s engineers (and not using Google’s free APIs, as far as I can tell).

It seems to be working fine, and there were a number of questions that bubbled up.

That included one about Mayer’s thoughts on her current executive team — which is still largely inherited from a series of previous administrations, despite some departures recently — and also how her regime will hold them accountable.

Algorithmic accountability among Yahoo execs? Things have changed!

Even better, declared the questioner of that particular query, to whoops from the audience: “I want an honest answer!”

But Mayer was diplomatic, only saying she was “pleasantly surprised” by the top execs. She also noted that the management would have quarterly goals that are transparent to the whole company. (I won’t say they do that at Google, but — ahem — they do that at Google.)

Mayer went through a number of questions in a precise and cut-the-mustard manner that employees seem to be enjoying, overall.

One very voted-up question was about leaks to the media, in particular to this Web site, and whether a board mole hunt has been successful (obviously not). Also, of course, what she was going to do about the situation.

Apparently, Mayer said she won’t be tracking down leakers, and that this new openness will solve the problem.

Good idea, but all that lovely transparency also needs some pretty good products if it’s going to work.

And product focus most definitely appears to be the path now. Mayer also showed off the new Yahoo Mail — which has been under revamp for a while, and was started under former Chief Product Officer Blake Irving — with some good response from Yahoos (last week, it was a look-see at its recent iteration of its IntoNow video offering).

There are other interface changes that have been in the works too, likely under the direction of Tim Parsey, Yahoo’s head designer, who also came on under Irving.

In fact, a lot of what Irving had pushed, including keeping advertising technology in-house and also maintaining control of key monetization engines, is the likeliest path going forward. The ad tech outsourcing deals, pushed by the interim CEO and his strategy head Jim Heckman, are apparently gone (and so are Levinsohn and now Heckman).

Also of interest to many at the company is the increased involvement of co-founder David Filo, who has become much less quiet under Mayer. I’d expect him to report directly to her — he’s actually been reporting for years to a variety of product and tech execs, despite owning more than six percent of Yahoo.

Thus, here’s my question for the new Q&A system for next week: So, when’s Jerry Yang showing back up?

Now, Kik Interactive, the company that introduced super-simple mobile messaging (and became the target of a lawsuit filed by RIM), is joining the multiscreen video party.

Kik’s new app, called Clik, allows you to view video that’s on your smartphone on a bigger connected screen.

Unlike Apple’s AirPlay, which requires users to be on a Wi-Fi network, or Movl’s apps for Samsung TVs, which in some cases require Wi-Fi, Clik uses the 3G capabilities of your phone and doesn’t require access to a special device on the receiving end — just any screen that is connected to the Internet and can run a browser.

For users concerned about the app burning up your phone data, Clik explains this by saying the app doesn’t stream the content to your TV or computer; it just instructs the browser to play video.

Once a user has downloaded the free Clik app to an iOS or Android device, he or she can navigate to ClikThis.com through a Web browser and scan the giant QR code that appears on the home page. The Web page then becomes a video viewing platform for the videos that appear on the smartphone. The interactivity between the two is pretty seamless, with the videos starting, stopping and switching as soon as a command is received from the smartphone.

One of the initially apparent drawbacks is that ClikThis.com is just a bare-bones host page of the video, with no command buttons on it, so you can’t start and stop the video from the browser — it has to be done through the phone.

In terms of video quality, it’s determined by the quality of the Web video and not the video as it appears on the phone.

Kik is launching Clik today, along with a software kit for developers to get cracking on different applications for the Clik platform. For now, it’s rolling out with a YouTube app. Creator Ted Livingston sees the potential for multi-user, multiscreen sharing: You’re at a party, say, and everyone’s using Clik on their phones, so they can all share and control the game, video or music playlists.

Kik’s battle with RIM over the messaging app is still continuing, though last fall Kik said it was working on a new version of its messenger that would work on RIM BlackBerry devices. Despite the legal fracas, Kik managed to nab $8 million in Series A funding last year from RRE Ventures, Spark Capital and Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures. Wilson and Adam Ludwin from RRE also joined Kik’s board.

As expected, the European Commission approved Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype late last week.

Next, the deal for the popular Internet communications company — which had previously been cleared by U.S. regulators — is likely to officially close later this week (paperwork!), said several sources close to the situation.

Now, of course, comes the hard part — which is whether Microsoft can successfully integrate the more nimble Skype into the belly of the software beast and allow it to thrive.

Some key questions:

How smoothly can Microsoft integrate Skype into its existing products, such as its unified communications platform, Outlook mail and Hotmail, Office, Messenger and Xbox Live? And, perhaps most of all, Windows Phone devices?

That said, will Skype also get to do what it needs for its own success beyond Microsoft? That includes working with mobile rivals Apple and Google, who now dominate the smartphone market, as well as many others. It has already managed to buy GroupMe group messaging start-up for $85 million, just months after its own acquisition in May.

And can the division — which will be led by Tony Bates, Skype’s CEO and now a Microsoft president — operate successfully located mostly away from the power center of Redmond, Wash.? Skype has a substantial office in Silicon Valley, as well as key engineering units in Estonia and Stockholm.

In that vein, will Microsoft be able to hold on to new talent like Bates and Skype’s geek squad, all of whom have substantial choices elsewhere? Like a lot of large tech companies, Microsoft is not known for being able to hold on to those who come in from the outside, in large part due to its insular culture of longtime execs.

In other words, how big a welcome will Microsoft’s other powerful presidents — such as Windows division head Steven Sinofsky — give Bates and company?

It’s a strategic departure for the company, which has said it will emphasize HTML5 over native apps so as to simplify development — in fact, it still hasn’t released a general-purpose Facebook iPad app. But now, Facebook will split off just its messaging features into the Messenger app that’s native for both iPhone and Android.

The Messenger app was developed by the Beluga team, which Facebook acquired in March, and like the start-up’s original product it emphasizes group planning.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

“We know people care more about what they do than where they do it,” Microsoft Office unit Vice President Takeshi Numoto said in a blog post published on Tuesday. “Whether it’s on a PC or Mac, a mobile phone or online through the Web Apps on multiple browsers, we continue to bring Office to the devices, platforms, and operating systems our customers are using. It should be about the ideas and information, not the device, right?”

Of course, OneNote is just one piece of Office–and one of the newer and least used of the main components at that. It’s also an interesting choice, since OneNote isn’t available natively for the Mac. But Microsoft seems to be leaving the door open to bring other pieces of Office to the iPhone.

In an interview, Microsoft senior director Jason Bunge said that the company had been working on OneNote for the iPhone for the past 18 months. Bunge wouldn’t say whether other Office components are also in the works, saying only that the company had no other apps to announce at this time.

“You can absolutely expect Office to expand its presence across other platforms,” Bunge said.

As for whether Microsoft plans to eventually charge for OneNote or other iPhone apps, Bunge said he didn’t know how long OneNote would remain free and had no other details on Microsoft’s pricing plans.

The goal in bringing OneNote to the iPhone, he said, is to allow those who do use the program on the PC to have it with them wherever they are. Rival programs, such as Evernote, have already been available on the iPhone.

Bunge did put in a bit of a plug for Windows and Windows Phone, saying, “We want Office on our Windows devices to be the best productivity experience that’s possible.”

OneNote is not Microsoft’s first app for the iPhone. Redmond already offers a Bing app, as well as Windows Live Messenger and the Microsoft Tag barcode reader, among other programs.

Update, 12:15 pm PT: Some people, including Mobilized, are getting an error message when they try to log in with their Windows Live ID. Since OneNote for the iPhone requires a Windows Live account, it effectively means those encountering the bug can’t use OneNote for the iPhone at all for now.

Microsoft says it is aware of the issue and is investigating.

1:45 pm PT: Microsoft has posted a blog noting the issues and says they are appearing intermittently as a result of high demand, with the recommended approach as “just keep trying.”

The lawsuit is bad timing for the small start-up, which was quickly gaining momentum. After its debut in November, it took just two weeks to generate two million downloads across BlackBerry, Android and iPhone. The free app allows users to send messages without paying text messaging fees and works across multiple platforms, unlike RIM’s own popular BlackBerry Messenger service, which is restricted to its own platform.

Worse yet, we heard Kik’s overnight success earlier this month drew the attention of several VCs, who were lining up with their checkbooks open and ready. It’s not clear if Kik was able to close that round before the lawsuit was filed on Tuesday in Canada’s Federal Court, but you can be sure that VCs will be über-vigorous in evaluating the company’s technology and any potential patents if a fight against RIM is in the works. To be sure, it will need the cash for legal fees alone.

The lawsuit was first spotted by David Lam, a lawyer in Ontario, Canada, who reported the electronic filing on his blog. Further details about RIM’s claims were unavailable, and we’ve reached out to both RIM and Kik for comment. UPDATE: In a blog post, Kik confirmed that it received the lawsuit yesterday. The company’s founder, Ted Livington, who worked at RIM as a student, writes: “I’m not afraid. I’m not surprised. But I am disappointed.”

Late Wednesday, its Motorola Mobility subsidiary slapped Microsoft with a lawsuit accusing the company of infringing 16 of its patents in a variety of products– including Windows, Exchange, Messenger, Outlook, Windows Marketplace, Bing Maps and Xbox.

“[We are] bringing this action against Microsoft in order to halt its infringement of key Motorola patents,” Kirk Dailey, corporate VP of intellectual property at Motorola Mobility, said in a statement. “Motorola has invested billions of dollars in R&D to create a deep and broad intellectual property portfolio and we will continue to do what is necessary to protect our proprietary technology.”

Microsoft, for its part, seems largely unfazed by Motorola’s right-back-at-ya maneuver. Indeed, in a statement, Horacio Gutierrez–Microsoft’s deputy general counsel of intellectual property and licensing–essentially said the company was waiting for it. “This move is typical of the litigation process and we are not surprised,” he said. “We remain confident in our position and will continue to move forward with the complaints we initiated against Motorola in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington and with the International Trade Commission (ITC).”

The government also has security concerns about Google Inc.’s Gmail email service and Internet telephony from companies such as Luxembourg-based Skype Ltd., the official told reporters.

“We will look into this one by one,” said the official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.
A Google (GOOG) executive said the company hasn’t received any related communication from the government, and hence is unable to comment. Executives at Research In Motion (RIMM) and Skype couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.
The official said RIM has assured that it will “come up with some technical solutions” for messenger and enterprise email services next week.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

There’s no question Yahoo owes longtime veteran exec Ash Patel a lot, as it has grown into a global Internet behemoth.

Since getting to the company in 1996–which essentially means he was present at the creation–Patel (pictured here) has, as the corporate page on its top execs notes, played “key roles across the company including architecting MyYahoo!, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! identity and the user database, and many other products that continue to impact millions of Yahoo! users.”

Now as EVP of the Audience Product Division, he presides over pretty much all of Yahoo’s well-known consumer products, from its homepage to its email to its search to, more recently, the product development of its media offerings.

But, because of his longevity, vast purview and clear impact on the company, Patel has also become a symbol for many inside Yahoo (YHOO) right now, who mention him most often in the should-he-stay-or-should-he-go-now debates about the future of the company and who should be in charge of that.

Thus, Patel’s fate is seen as a key indicator of what is to come at the company, especially whether he and it can change with the very fast-changing times. While his love and loyalty to Yahoo are unquestioned, like many at Yahoo, can he be a true agent of change who could upend all he has built?

The big question, of course: Can old Yahoos learn new tricks?

That, of course, is all now up to new CEO Carol Bartz, who is busy restructuring the company to her liking, in decisions that are about to come down after only six weeks into her tenure.

Bartz is clearly casting herself as the agent of dramatic change and speed, as she noted that in a recent memo to staff:

What does this have to do with the need for speed? Many of the things I just talked about could have and should have been decided earlier but we haven’t been an organization that has embraced the need for speedy decisions, even when they are the tough ones. We can all be part of changing this and getting back to an organization that is fast on its feet.”

With the reorganization in flux, even as big departures occur (mobile head Marco Boerries today, for example), it could start to feel like the rapture at Yahoo, as the old ways make way for, well, the unknown.

Right now, it seems Patel might stay, reporting to CTO Ari Balogh, who is about to also get control over all of Yahoo’s products. Previously, Patel reported directly to outgoing President Sue Decker.

But others are convinced he will go, if not right away in the current upheaval, then soon enough, with Bartz and Balogh on the hunt for a crackerjack new outside product exec to take over and, more importantly, take a fresh look Yahoo’s many offerings.

That’s been Patel’s job for a long time, after a long rise to the top from when he arrived from Oracle (ORCL). He’s been SVP of platform engineering, chief product officer and EVP of the Platforms and Infrastructure Division, before getting his most recent title in one of Yahoo’s umpteenth reorgs.

“Ash is the symbol of old Yahoo, and now he is really actually one of the only ones with longevity in top management,” said one person at the company. “What happens to him–whether he stays and transforms or simply goes–says a lot about the future of Yahoo.”

Here is a video interview I did with Patel recently about the launch of some open and social-networking initiatives at Yahoo (Front Doors head Tapan Bhat, who reports to Patel, is also in the video):

Last month, Microsoft unveiled Windows Live, its Web-based attempt to consolidate many of these activities. Windows Live can be found at home.live.com and includes programs that cover a lot of ground: Hotmail (email), SkyDrive (online storage), Spaces (blogging), Calendar and Events (online invitations). Four new Windows Live categories — Profile, People, Photos and Groups — create a Facebook/MySpace-like feel by following activities of networked users and sharing that data with others.

If you’re using a Windows PC, you can additionally download a suite of seven free desktop applications called Windows Live Essentials from download.live.com that enhance and coordinate with the Windows Live services. These include Messenger, Photo Gallery, Mail, Writer, Movie Maker Beta, Family Safety and Toolbar. I downloaded the Essentials and enjoyed using many of them, especially Mail, Messenger and Toolbar.

But I focused my testing this week on the Windows Live Web services, which, as advertised, let me control various elements of my digital life in one place with one password. SkyDrive is a simple and approachable online-storage repository that will be truly useful for a lot of folks who want a central place to keep files. The Windows Live Profile offers handsome personalized pages with bright colors and designs; compared side-by-side with a Facebook page, it made Facebook look dull and sparse. I also used Windows Live Photos to upload digital photos onto my Profile and then shared them with friends and family in three quick steps.

New Windows Live programs include Profile, which offers personalized pages.

Microsoft (MSFT) smartly realized that most people already visit a variety of sites for online pursuits and will want to add those activities to their Windows Live Profile. Users can currently link to 12 other sources, including Twitter, Flickr, Photobucket, WordPress, Pandora and Yelp — but not Facebook or MySpace. Microsoft says that it’s working to build relationships with Facebook and MySpace and hopes to have related news next year.

But though various Web activities can be added to a Live Profile, this connection isn’t as productive as it could be. Take Twitter, for example. I added my Twitter account to my Live Profile, but on Live Profile I could see only tweets from myself and from people in my Windows Live network. To see tweets from the 50 people I follow on Twitter, I had to go to Twitter.com.

I had a similar experience with Pandora. I added my Pandora account to my Live Profile, and when I bookmarked Keith Urban as a favorite artist, this tidbit appeared on my Live Profile page. But when I listened to Christmas tunes for a few hours, nothing on my Profile page reflected this (i.e., “Katie is listening to Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ ”).

After linking my Live Profile to my Flickr account, I posted photos on Flickr.com, and seconds later, these pics appeared on my Live Profile. But other activities from Flickr weren’t reflected on my Live Profile, such as when my contacts posted photos or when those in a Flickr group of which I’m a member posted photos. To see this, I had to visit Flickr.com.

Microsoft says that in the case of Web activities, the outside companies choose what to show and what not to show. But I can’t use Windows Live as a home base for my other online activities unless it displays useful data that save me trips to other Web sites.

Messenger displays friends’ updates.

Like many social-networking services, Windows Live gives special privileges to those who are in the network. To belong to a Windows Live network, one must first have a Windows Live ID, which anyone can get by signing up for Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger or Xbox Live.

Windows Live also allows interaction with people outside the network. For instance, I can share any of the photos that I upload to my profile with friends and family who don’t have Windows Live IDs by simply emailing a link to them. These people don’t need a Windows Live ID to look at the photos.

When I used Windows Live to share photos with my sister, who has received hundreds of digital shots from me on every photo-sharing Web site I’ve tested, she wasn’t impressed. She correctly pointed out that other sharing sites, like Shutterfly, allow full-screen slideshow views; Windows Live limits slide shows to the size of the browser window.

Windows Live Web services work best on Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer browser, version 6 and up, and a special quick-photo-upload tool works only with Internet Explorer. This uploading tool doesn’t work with Apple’s (AAPL) Safari browser or the Mozilla Firefox browser; instead, you must slowly add each photo to your page, selecting them one at a time.

If you’re using a Windows PC, the Windows Live Essentials are definitely worth installing. Photo Gallery enables simple photo publishing directly from your computer’s collection of My Pictures, and specific faces can be labeled and tagged in each shot. Windows Live Mail, which replaced Outlook Express last year, is a smoothly designed program that I rely on every day for use with three different email accounts. Windows Live Messenger links into the Live Web services specifically by retrieving the status updates for each person in your network and displaying those in a ticker-like panel at the bottom of Messenger. The Windows Live Toolbar works only in Internet Explorer but shows an at-a-glance view of your network’s updates, along with photos, email and calendar — all in the top panel of the browser.

Windows Live Essentials are still in beta, or testing, mode, and Windows Live Web services will add more partnerships next month. I’ll be anxious to see if these new partnerships operate more productively with the Live Profile. Aggregating content from across the Web isn’t worthwhile unless that content is fully and usefully accessible in its new home.

Still, Windows Live Web services and Essentials provide solid tools that can help you organize your email, messaging, photos, storage, scheduling and social networking in one place with one password. That, by itself, is a relief.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081216/organizing-your-web-life-in-one-place/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081112/microsoft-officially-facebooks-oops-socializes-windows-live-internet-services/ http://allthingsd.com/20081112/microsoft-officially-facebooks-oops-socializes-windows-live-internet-services/#comments Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:00:15 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=6420

Microsoft officially rolled out the next version of its Windows Live Services tonight, with a heavy emphasis on socializing its online offerings and giving users better tools to share all sorts of information from across the Web within them.

Microsoft (MSFT) said the changes–similar to those made by Yahoo (YHOO) and Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL recently–would “begin rolling out to customers in the U.S. over the coming weeks and will be made available globally in 54 countries and in 48 languages by early 2009.”

You might call its the “Facebooking” of Windows Live, which is the brand name for Microsoft’s communications and other related online services aimed at consumers, especially because the much anticipated changes also include a new profile and a “What’s New” feed.

So, if imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should feel beloved by Microsoft, since both are direct borrows of two of the social-networking site’s most prominent features.

(See many screenshots of the newly refreshed Window Live services below.)

But don’t call it a social network, said Brian Hall, who is the general manager of the Windows Live unit, in a lovely breakfast interview with BoomTown yesterday.

“No one wants to sign up for another social network,” said Hall. “But everyone does want to be able to share and bring together all they do on the Web, and we want to make sure all our users can do that in the easiest way possible.”

(Sadly, the video I did with Hall–who is Seth Rogen lookalike, and I mean that in a good way–got eaten up in my new Flip MinoHD software, which was entirely due to my boneheadedness.)

But, in it, Hall underscored that Microsoft is now fully committed to opening Windows Live Services up to whatever consumers want to do with their online lives and wherever they want to do it.

And, indeed, the “next generation” of Windows Live will inject social elements into its Photo Gallery photo sharing, Hotmail email, Spaces groups and Messenger instant messaging offerings, as well as Microsoft’s calendar and mobile products.

The move will also more significantly integrate many third-party partners into the mix. Microsoft’s outside partners announced tonight include Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, Twitter, WordPress and Yelp. (See the full list below.)

Microsoft also announced alliances with Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and China Telecom to deliver Windows Live services.

Microsoft says there are more than 460 million Windows Live customers (its instant messaging offering accounts for a bulk of this number and will see the most socializing impact), but is bowing to the obvious and inevitable trend of consumers creating and sharing all over the Internet.

But, said Hall, Microsoft is also sticking to its mantra of “software plus services” here, noting that consumers want the existing tools they use now regularly to become more social, rather than having to abandon them.

Microsoft is also launching its Windows Live Essentials, which are free widgets that can be used across a range of devices and places, such as personal computers, mobile phones and on Web sites.

Finally, to let users store all that content and information, Microsoft said it is also increasing its Windows Live SkyDrive online storage offering from 5GB to 25GB.

Here are the screenshots of the new Windows Live services (click on them to make them larger):

Windows Live Home Page

Windows Live Profile Page

Windows Live Messenger Page

Windows Live Web Activities Page

Windows Live Groups Page

Partner Integration for Windows Live

Blog
Blogkoll.se
Live Journal
Overblog
SixApart
Twitter*
Wordpress*

Reviews
11870.com
Amazon
Digg
Flixster*
Goodreads
Kaboodle
StumbleUpon*
Yelp*

Photo
Bilddagboken.se
Flickr*
Photobucket
Rock You
SmugMug

Music/Video
Last.fm
iLike
Break
Pandora
Seesmic
Veoh

Social Networking
Biip.no
Dada.net
Daum*
Dopplr
Faves
Friendster
Hevre
Hyves
Jeeran
Libero Community
Lokalisten
Mail.ru
Metroflog
Nettby
OleOle
Playahead
Qik
SlideShare
Studenti.it
TripIt, Inc.*
Yandex
YuKu
zoo.gr

OEM and Services Partners
HP
Lenovo

Telecommunications and Broadband Service Providers

China Telecom
Qwest

FrameIt Partners
Amlogic
iGala
Navteq
PanDigital
PhotoVu
RMI
Smartparts
ViewSonic

*Denotes First Set of Available Feed Partners

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081112/microsoft-officially-facebooks-oops-socializes-windows-live-internet-services/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20071017/palms-centro-tries-to-steal-pearls-glimmer/ http://allthingsd.com/20071017/palms-centro-tries-to-steal-pearls-glimmer/#comments Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:01:00 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20071017/palms-centro-tries-to-steal-pearls-glimmer/ A number of my friends, ranging in age from mid-20s to early 30s, are in no rush to abandon their basic cellphones for smart phones like BlackBerrys or Treos. It’s not for lack of technological skill; these people are constantly text messaging and emailing, and spend a huge amount of time online every day. But they’d rather not carry a large, geeky-looking device. Nor do they want to pay a lot for this device and its monthly plan. Some of them even assume that smart phones work only with corporate email accounts.

The Palm Centro

The two companies most often associated with corporate-issued devices, Research In Motion Ltd. and Palm Inc. are anxious to convert people like my friends. This week I tested Palm’s new attempt: the Centro (www.palm.com/centro). It looks like a hip, miniature version of the more expensive Palm Treo, with most of the same functions and only costs $99 after rebates and a two-year contract. The Centro comes in onyx and ruby, though the latter won’t be sold until next month.

Overall, I liked the Centro. It has plenty of pluses, including a touch screen, easy email set-up for personal accounts like Gmail and Hotmail, built-in instant messaging for three programs, a camera for still shots or video and expandable memory. It’s available now and runs on Sprint’s fast 3G network, costing at least $15 monthly for data on top of your voice plan. Like the Treo, it has a tiny stylus for detailed screen selecting and an on/off ringer switch.

RIM should be credited with introducing one of the first hip, mini smart phones to the demographic of 25-to-30-year-olds without smart phones. About a year ago, it brought out the $200 BlackBerry Pearl 8100, which is narrower than traditional BlackBerrys and is easy to mistake for a stylish cellphone. It uses a condensed keyboard with two letters per key that works using auto-correcting SureType technology, and has a glowing trackball for navigation.

For Palm’s Centro to compete with the Pearl, it, too, needed to be thinner left to right. But instead of doubling up letters per key and using SureType like the Pearl, the Centro has a shrunken version of Palm’s full keyboard; letter keys are squeezed so close together that large-fingered users will likely have trouble. I found the Pearl’s keyboard easier to use because its keys are flatter and larger compared with the Centro keys, which caused me to mistype messages. But the Centro’s tiny keyboard could be a real step up for people who still use their cellphone’s numbered keypad to type text messages.

The Centro’s touch screen saves time and makes navigation easier. The BlackBerry Pearl doesn’t have a touch screen, forcing users to do a lot of scrolling with the navigational trackball.

A success with the Centro would be much needed good news for Palm, which hasn’t had an easy go of it lately. While RIM has been cranking out more stylish BlackBerrys, Palm’s solid Treo hasn’t changed all that drastically in the past couple of years. Even loyal Treo users are starting to complain about Palm’s old operating system crashing. Of course, the popularity of Apple Inc.’s iPhone only rubs salt in the wounds of this once unstoppable company.

RIM will bring out a new Pearl, the 8130, next month to step up its game. This Pearl will be the same physically, but will have some internal changes, including the ability to work on the CDMA network, built-in GPS and upgraded software.

I tested a stylish ruby Centro and also got my hands on an early version of the BlackBerry Pearl 8130 from Verizon Wireless. Lined up side by side, the Palm Centro looks like a chubby version of the Pearl. The Pearl looks and feels sleeker and sharper than the Centro, due in part to the Centro’s rounded edges and tiny, bubble-shaped keys.

The Pearl is just a hair smaller in all directions — width, height and depth. The Centro is almost a full ounce heavier than the Pearl, but each weighs only 4.2 and 3.4 ounces, respectively. The Centro’s 320×320 resolution screen looks brighter than the Pearl’s 240×260 screen.

I focused on the Centro, setting up two personal email accounts on it in just a few minutes. I started out typing very slowly on the keyboard, which has keys made of a slightly sticky material. The more familiar I became with it, the faster I could go, but I’m still not completely comfortable using the keyboard.

I quickly navigated through the Centro’s menus using Palm’s familiar operating system. The touch screen saved me from arrowing around to select an icon or menu; I just tapped the screen using my finger or the stylus. First-time smart-phone users will appreciate this aspect.

I made calls on the Centro, pressing the phone shortcut key to get started. The keyboard’s number keys work just as they do on a Treo, but I preferred using the larger virtual buttons on the touch screen. The Centro felt like a normal cellphone in my hand and against my ear, especially compared with the clunky, rectangular Treos and BlackBerrys. The tiny Centro fit into the smallest purse I own.

An icon on the home screen marked “IM” linked me directly into a screen where I could log in to and use three instant-messaging programs simultaneously: AOL’s AIM, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger. I jumped between IM sessions using the left and right navigation key buttons. But a faster way to do this was just by touching the screen to select a program. I also tapped the screen to select names of friends before IMing them. Again, the touch screen saved time and took out the guesswork of which key to press to navigate.

I played preloaded music on the Centro and BlackBerry Pearl; both have built-in speakers that sound remarkably good for such little devices.

Battery life on the Centro is estimated at 3.5 hours of talk time and up to 12.5 days of standby time. The Pearl 8130′s talk time is expected to fetch 3.8 hours before quitting, but its standby battery is expected to last only nine days. I didn’t perform rigorous battery tests, but found that my BlackBerry Pearl needed to be charged before my Palm Centro after a weekend of using them for roughly the same amount of time.

The BlackBerry Pearl 8130 comes with only RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger program. Both the Pearl and Centro have 64 megabytes of internal memory and the ability to expand that using microSD cards.

If you’re considering the leap from a cellphone to a smart phone but don’t want the bigger, geekier look of one of these helpful devices, the Palm Centro is a good option. Its keyboard will take some getting used to, but its touch screen will win you over by providing a simpler way to navigate — especially for smart-phone novices.

-Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

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