Checking Facebook on the move is a great way to keep in touch with friends and keep up to date with what is going on. But when you are moving about you will invariably hit an area where there is poor signal, and you find that the official Facebook app can be a little on the slow side even at the best of times. oStream offers a possible solution by synchronizing your contents so it is available for offline reading.

Even for those who will own up to being addicted to Facebook, the official Facebook app is far from being without problems. It can be slow and cumbersome to use, awkward to navigate -- generally a bit of a pain. In addition to making your newsfeed available offline, oStream also has the added benefit of running much more quickly that the Facebook app -- or many popular alternatives for that matter.

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How important is Facebook really? The answer may come soon after April 12, when the social network releases Home to Google Play. The Android add-on usurps the homescreen, putting interactions/people first and pushes apps to the background. This, ah, Home invasion means potential trouble for Apple and Google, but in vastly different ways. Apps anchor both their platforms, curated content and the digital lifestyles users adopt. Facebook bets that between the choice of both ways, human relationships matter more.

For either the fruit-logo company or search and information giant, another question is perhaps more significant: Is Facebook's mobile experience already good enough? Related: Do most users want to be enmeshed in a constant stream of social updates and interactions most of the time? Affirmative answer to either, or both, spells trouble for the platform developers but most worrisome for Apple, for which Facebook Home affronts and condemns the entire business model.

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Well, the rumors were false. Facebook didn't release a phone today, not that I'm surprised. There are reasons why we write so few rumor stories here at BetaNews -- they often are false. "We're not building a phone. We're not building an operating system", CEO Mark Zuckerberg said early this afternoon. But the social network has launched an OEM program for the new Facebook Home, which displaces the default Android start screen. HTC is first partner. Aptly named then, the smartphone is called HTC First.

Preorders start today, and the device will be available exclusively from AT&T, in four colors (black, pale blue, red and white), on April 12. Facebook Home, which also will be downloadable same day for HTC One X and One X+ and Samsung Galaxy S III and Note II, is First's default experience. Essentially, the social network becomes primary user interface on top of Android.

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It's the question many people have asked since the social network announced its April 4 event one week ago. This live blog answers the question.

Today's "new Home on Android" follows by nearly a month, a massive user interface redesign, as Facebook unifies the look and feel across devices and puts more emphasis on mobile. Obviously Android is part of that. Paragraphs are reverse order, with newest up top. All times EDT.

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Kids. They grow up so fast. It seems like just yesterday that my Android phone finally became a member of the Instagram generation, only just "slightly" behind all of those iPhones out there. Now the social photo sharing service is celebrating its one year anniversary on the Google-based mobile operating system.

Philip McAllister, of the Instagram Android team, announces that "One year ago today we launched Instagram for Android. In less than a day, over a million people downloaded the app, and now nearly half of all Instagrammers use the Android app to share photos with friends, family and the world".

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The notion of a Facebook phone has certainly lingered for a few years now -- the concept reached a point of half-hearted fruition in the HTC ChaCha and Salsa in 2011, but neither really embodied the true potential of a Facebook phone. They were much more of "throw and see what sticks" devices -- with the only tangible evidence of deeper Facebook integration being the Facebook button on the devices’ fronts.

Much has changed in nearly two years: Facebook’s Open Graph, the acquisition of Instagram and the introduction of Facebook Camera and Messenger applications, among others. Perhaps the most strident progression Mark Zuckerberg’s social network has made in the past two years is reaching 1 billion active users. And counting. That’s approximately one in seven people in the world, and an even larger proportion if accounting for the developed world alone.

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Complexity creep is ruining Google's social network, much like Facebook before the recent, and quite exciting, redesign. I use G+ mainly on mobile devices, and that experience is in the outhouse -- and, whew, does it stink -- following this week's app update. Just four days ago. It seems like four years. My use of the service has collapsed. There is too much clutter, too much distraction. The user experience on Nexus 10 is analogous to going from a vast, wide-open forest to thicket and bramble.

But the larger problem is change, change, change. Google constantly modifies the Plus user interface -- experiments really -- and users are lab rats.

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BlackBerry Z10 social butterflies rejoice! Updated Facebook and Twitter apps are now available for BB10 sporting new features and enhancements over previous iterations. Users should find it easier to "stay connected and do more with social media", according to the Canadian smartphone maker which detailed the changes.

Twitter was previously updated three weeks ago alongside LinkedIn, and the latest iteration only contains more modest improvements by comparison. Twitter 10.0.2 features a Connect tab where users can view all interactions, similar to the Android, iOS or Windows Phone counterparts, a counter which displays the number of favorites for a tweet and the ability to display photos, summaries and other items straight within tweets.

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Google updates just keep on coming. Earlier today new versions of Google+ for Android and iOS pushed out, and I've been too busy to handle the goods (Later! Promise!). Two key areas of focus: Sharing and sharing -- as in primping photos and being better part of Communities. The updates are somewhat different for both platforms.

In an unsurprising move, the iOS app picks up some features from Snapseed, which Google acquired last autumn. So now, when you’re sharing a photo, you can: "Do basic edits like rotate and crop, as well as select filters like Drama and Retrolux; adjust saturation, contrast, brightness and lots more by sliding your fingers up-and-down, then left-and-right; single tap at any time to compare your creation with the original", Amar Gandhi, Google+ director of product management, says.

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Last week, Digg revealed plans to build a replacement app for Google's soon-to-be-defunct Reader and compete with other services that have suddenly become popular, like Feedly and The Old Reader. While I wait to someday have my OPML file uploaded to The Old Reader (currently number 3,590 in the queue), I am trying out some other alternatives -- I really liked Feedspot, but updating seems spotty.

In a blog post, Digg says "Google did a lot of things right with its Reader, but based on what we’re hearing from users, there is room for meaningful improvement. We want to build a product that’s clean and flexible, that bends easily and intuitively to the needs of different users. We want to experiment with and add value to the sources of information that are increasingly important, but difficult to surface and organize in most reader applications — like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, or Hacker News. We likely won’t get everything we want into v1, but we believe it’s worth exploring".

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Millions of people around the world use Foursquare to check into places they visit. The company has taken a year’s worth of these check-ins at two of the planet’s largest cities -- New York and Tokyo -- and plotted them on a map.

The result is a video that runs from 4AM right round the clock and up to 2AM, showing the cities pulsing as they come to life and then die back down again.

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I've been on Twitter so long, I forgot just how short a time that really is -- or how much has changed since March 21, 2006. The service claims 200 million active users tweeting 400 million times a day. But the real measure is much larger -- how Twitter, and other innovations arriving around the same time, fundamentally changed billions of lives five to seven years later.

The service's editorial director, Karen Wickre, calls Twitter a "global town square", which is appropriate description. People gather to look, listen, gossip, grab news or listen to the town crier. I've often grumbled about the 140-character limitation, but brevity has benefits. Statements are succinct. No one talks on and on and on without interruption. If anything, butting in defines Twitter interaction. You will be heard whether or not anyone wants you to be.

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When I signed onto group chat this morning, my colleagues bantered about problems accessing LinkedIn. They couldn't. I navigated to the site easily enough, but got this message when trying to log in: "An Error occurred during authorization, please try again later". The social network's Twitter feed confirms there are problems, but information is contradictory.

About two hours ago: "We're aware that the site is currently down, and our team is working on it right now. Stay tuned". An hour later: "The issues you may have experienced with our site earlier have been cleared. Thanks for your patience". But they weren't fixed. At 9:21 am EDT: "Our site is currently experiencing some issues. Our team is continuing their work on this. Stay tuned".

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When I first started using the web full time 19 years ago, few pages had movement. Then browsers supported animated gifts, which on many sites were gaudy things. You could count on them to add a touch of crass, no class, to any webpage. MySpace anyone? My disdain, and I'm not alone in this, for animated gifs goes back nearly two decades.

Funny thing, the moving clips are in-style thanks to better authoring tools and social sharing. Many animated gifs are still gaudy, but who really minds getting one as a joke from friends. Now they're easier to find using the planet's most popular search engine.

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Twentieth in a series. Windows Store has seen another strong week in terms of new apps that found their way into the store. The app count of the U.S. store is currently 32,552 apps in total, an increase of 1,104 apps over last week; 25,062 of those apps are free to download and install, an increase of 927 apps in the last seven days. Paid apps saw an increase by 177 apps this week to a total of 7,490 apps.

The Yahoo Mail app received a much needed update this week introducing support for new languages, the ability to  add, edit and delete folders, and to search for words in emails in the account.

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