But people are still downloading it and trying it out. As of today, Facebook Home on Google Play has surpassed 500,000 installs.

We don’t know the exact number of installs, as Google Play only gives us an unspecific snapshot of the numbers. Right now, it says that the number of installs is somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million. The Next Web noticed that Twitter users noticed the jump from “100,000 to 500,000″ to “500,000 to 1 million” some time on Sunday.

500,000 may seem like a small number of installs, considering that Facebook has over a billion monthly active users and that something like the Facebook app has between 100 million and 500 million installs. But in a week’s time, to be working its way to a million installs, is pretty good for Facebook Home considering it’s only available on a handful of Android devices.

Still, the news isn’t nearly all positive for Facebook. Facebook Home is still suffering from poor user reviews. Last week, we told you that after just 3 days on the market, Facebook Home had sunk to an average rating of 2.4 out of 5 in the Google Play Store. At that time, 47% of all reviews awarded the app 1 star.

Now, at Facebook Home surpassed 500,000 installs, the negativity is growing. The average rating has fallen to 2.2 and 1-star reviews now account for nearly 52% of all reviews.

Is Twitter thinking about doing the same?

Speaking at All Things D’s Dive Into Mobile, Twitter VP of Product Michael Sippey left the door open for such a product.

“There are a lot of things we’re looking at on Android,” he said. “I think [Facebook Home] is an interesting product. I’d like to see tweets there. So we’ll see.”

So, what would a “Twitter Home” product look like? And would you want it?

Well, we can imagine an Android launcher that displays your tweet stream on the homepage in the same way that Facebook displays the news feed. Although Twitter can also be media-rich, the fact that Twitter users typically follow hundreds and even thousands of users, all of which appear in the stream unfiltered (unlike Facebook) makes it seem like there would need to be some tweaking to make sure the user isn’t flooded with too much content. It would be pretty easy to integrate Twitter notifications and messaging into the base Android experience, though.

Of course, there’s no telling what a Twitter-based Android OS-lite interface would look like. And Twitter hasn’t said that they are working on or even seriously thinking about something like this. But Sippey makes it clear that Twitter is curious about users being able to turn their devices into “Twitter Phones.”

What do you think? Sound like something you might want to play around with?

First up, iOS users will be able to use chat heads – one of the main features of Facebook Home for Android. Of course, these chat heads won’t work on your iOS home screen, only when you’re using the Facebook app. But it will let you keep multiple conversations going much easier when you’re inside the app.

As with chat heads on Android, you simply tap them to open up the chat thread, and drag them around and place them wherever you want on the screen.

Last week, on the same day Facebook unveiled Facebook Home for Android, they also brought chat heads to Facebook Messenger for Android – you know, to throw Android users with device not supported by Facebook Home a bone.

The update also brings stickers to the iOS app.

Also, we’re finally getting those changes to the news feed on mobile that Facebook announced but is still slowly rolling out on desktop. According to Facebook, the biggest changes will be seen on the iPad, “where you’ll see brighter, more beautiful stories.”

Facebook says that the update will be ready to download later today in the App Store.

Apparently, Snapchat is processing more photos daily than Instagram. And not just more – nearly four times as many.

The figure was announced today by Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference put on by All Things D.

According to Spiegel, Snapchat is moving upwards of 150 million photos across the network every day. If you compare that to another popular photo-sharing service like Instagram, you find that Snapchat is moving a significantly more amount of total photos. Instagram currently boasts 40 million photos taken per day.

Of course, Instagram and Snapchat are very different services. Instagram is about long-lasting photos, ones that can be liked, commented upon, and browsed in a social networking frame. Snapchat, on the other hand, is a lot more focused on person-to-person communication.

If you’re unfamiliar with Snapchat, the premise is quite simple – but rather ingenious. Users can send short photos or videos to other users – self-deleting photos or videos being the most important aspect. Users can designate exactly how long they want the photo or video to stay viewable, after which time it will disappear. The app even notifies the sender if the recipient tried to make the communication more than ephemeral by taking a screenshot.

When it first launched, Snapchat defended itself against allegations that it was simply an app for sexting. On its face, it does appear like the perfect sort of app to send sexts without the fear of permanence. And believe me, I’m sure that there is plenty of that going on. But with 150 million photos taken daily, it’s clear that Snapchat is more a serious player and less of a niche sexting app.

Earlier this year, it became clear that Facebook saw Snapchat as a competitor when they released their “Poke” app. To say that the Poke app is heavily inspired by Snapchat is putting it the best way possible.

Oh, and speaking of Facebook, they say that they see “more than 300 million photos uploaded every day.” By that figure, Snapchat is seeing nearly half of what Facebook sees every day. Now that’s incredible.

When Facebook first announced Home, they launched a quirky little ad featuring some plane antics. Now, Facebook has unveiled the second Facebook Home ad in this style, made by the people at Wieden+Kennedy. This ad is called “Dinner”:

Facebook also put out this semi-ad called “Launch Day.” It stars Zuckerberg, whose pep talk is flooded with events from on engineer’s news feed. Both of these ads stick with the Facebook Home brings your Facebook life everywhere theme. Check it out:

As of right now, you can only download Facebook Home if you have one of these four Android devices: HTC One X, HTC One X+, the Samsung Galaxy S III or the Samsung Galaxy Note II. In the future, the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S4 will also allow for Facebook Home.

And then, of course, there’s the HTC First – the first phone to launch with Facebook Home ready to go. Don’t want to call it a “Facebook Phone” – then don’t. But it’s definitely the first Facebook centric phone on the market. It also hits the shelves today.

“Facebook Home is the mobile experience that puts your friends at the heart of your phone. From the moment you turn it on, you see a steady stream of friends’ posts and photos on your home screen. Upfront notifications and quick access to your essentials mean you’ll never miss a moment. And when you download Facebook Messenger, you can keep chatting with friends when you’re using other apps,” says Facebook.

And about those chat heads that let you “keep chatting with friends when you’re using other apps.” If you have an Android phone, want to download Facebook Home, but alas, your Android phone isn’t supported – all is not lost. Today, ahead of the Facebook Home launch, Facebook added chat heads as a part of the Facebook Messenger app for Android. Now you can make use of/be incredibly annoyed by chat heads no matter which Android device you own, depending on how you look at it.

No, not a suggestion, as in “you should spend more time on mobile in order to better develop for mobile.”

It was more like a “we’re forcing you to use mobile.” And they did it by internally shutting down their access to the desktop site.

Here’s what Facebook product manager Josh Williams (the former CEO of Gowalla) recently had to say at SXSW:

To be honest, a couple of weeks ago, myself and a number of other product managers had access to our website internally shut off,. Basically it forced us to use only mobile devices for a week. It forced us to say, ‘Hey, we have these features that exist in one place but not in another, and we have to remedy.

This is some serious dogfooding (using your own product in order to learn more about your own product), but it’s not the first time we’ve heard of this kind of thing coming out of Facebook.

Back in August of 2012, Facebook released a massive overhaul of their iOS app. It was entirely rebuilt upon the concept of speed – and they succeeded with an app that was slick and blazingly fast compared to the previous version.

Soon after, Facebook instituted an iPhone-free policy around the workplace in order to force employees to use Facebook for Android. The feeling was that users who were hands on with the Android app would be better at fixing it, because it surely needed an overhaul at the time as well. It eventually got that speed boost.

[via FastCompany]

First off, the new version of Facebook for Android allows users to change their profile picture. This follows last month’s update, which gave users the ability to change their cover photos directly from the app. Earlier this week, Facebook finally gave iOS users the ability to change their cover photos.

Facebook says that there are now fewer taps involved when users want to start a group message. Facebook also updated iOS to improve messaging, tweaking this same thing as well as making it easier to name and find group conversations.

Lastly, Facebook now lets Android users hide stories and report spam from the news feed.

Like with its iOS app, Facebook is keeping to the regular update schedule with its Android app. Ever since announcing that they would push app updates every 4 to 8 weeks, Facebook has, for the most part, made good on their word.

You can grab the update right now over on Google Play.

First up, the new Facebook for iOS finally allows users to change their cover photos inside the app. This functionality has been available on Android for a few weeks, and now iOS users can quickly take a new photo or upload one from their camera roll. Note that this is an iPhone only (sorry, iPad users) feature.

Next, Facebook has announced two new updates to messaging. There are now “fewer taps to start a group message” and it should be “easier to name and find group conversations.”

Back in September of 2012, Facebook announced that they would be updating their mobile apps every 4-8 weeks. According to the company, this was based on a shift from “feature-driven” release process to a “date-driven” one. This basically means that instead of working on a bundle of new features and waiting until they were all perfect before releasing the update, Facebook i now pushing updates in a timely manner on a set schedule.

Facebook last pushed and update to their iOS app just under a month ago. It added free calling within the app, a feature that first appeared on the Facebook Messenger app. The update also made the like, comment, and share buttons bigger and better-looking.

You can grab today’s Facebook for iOS update over on iTunes.

For the past few months, Facebook has been testing a one-column Timeline layout that puts all your posts in one, larger column and everything else like music, photos, recent activity, and other Open Graph actions on the other side.

Today, Facebook is beginning to roll this new Timeline out to all users.

The new layout puts all of your post on the right-hand side in a single, streamlined column. Everything else, like friends, photos, and more now rest in the smaller, left-hand column:

Your About page is also getting a facelift, with more focus given to your interest (music, movies, books, TV, etc.) and the apps that deal with them. Each interest gets its own section, for instance “Movies” allows you to easily add films you’ve watched, films you “want to watch” and films you “like.”

You can either manually add movies to this list or you can let apps like Netflix (which just opened up Facebook integration today) or Flixster do the legwork.

You can also add custom apps to your Timeline to express what you’re most interested in, for example Instagram.

“To simplify how apps are displayed on timeline, we’re replacing aggregations with app sections. Previously, only top-ranked Open Graph stories and aggregations would appear on timeline. Now, when someone adds an app section, it will appear in the same place until they edit the order or visibility,” says Facebook.

If you want to add a specific app to your Timeline, all you have to do is click the “add to profile” button on you app section page.

Facebook says that they will roll out these changes over the coming weeks, so be patient.