Is Facebook Home a good name?

It’s not a phone. It’s not an app. It’s something much more ambitious: software that integrates with your existing phone and brings your Facebook news streaming right to your home-screen.

Instead of seeing your lock-screen as soon as you turn on your phone, or the rest of your apps when you unlock it, Facebook Home would have it that you see only your Facebook Newsfeed. In other words, like a golden retriever puppy, it’s determined to insert itself between you and the rest of your life.

To properly understand how ballsy this is, let’s look at Starbucks as a comparison. The coffee chain has said publicly that it strives to be your “third place.” You go home. You go to work. You go get a caramel mocha Frappuccino. That’s it, loser.

But Facebook says to hell with that. We’re more important. If Starbucks wants to be a destination, we want to be where you kick your shoes off and don’t have to worry about anything or anybody else. We don’t want people to have to make an effort to GO to Facebook. We want it to be there already. We want to be Home.

So is Facebook Home a good product name? We say yes. It’s short, powerful and honest. The name feels ubiquitous enough to match the ambitions of the product. Actually, if the name were any less ubiquitous, they would run the risk of people jumping over the name entirely in favor of saying something like “Are you running Facebook?”, which would present a slew of other concerns. Plus Home is already recognizable as the base of operations on the site itself. It feels like a natural place to end up.

If this all sounds a little invasive, you’re not alone. Facebook Home is not for everyone. It’s for a generation of kids that already spend a good deal of their lives on the social network, sharing, liking and keeping watchful tabs on each other. Sounds more like a halfway home.

So, whether you think it’s a destination or a domicile, Facebook Home looks to be the beginning of a new wave of phone applications fighting for your home screen. It’s up to you if you want to let them in … or just lock the doors.

Want to see what makes a great name tick? Check out our posts on naming.