A. alienating B. assumption C. attendance D. combines E. converts
F. dedicated G. deliberate H. equivalently I. potentially J. presence
K. reckons L. revenues M. speculation N. uncovered O. unveiled
A day after the mobile phone celebrated its 40th birthday, Facebook has produced something that it hopes will make certain of the devices even more useful. On April 4th the giant social network
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Home, new software that is designed to give it more prominence on mobile phones powered by Android, an operating system developed by Google.
This matters because more and more folk are now accessing social networks from mobile devices rather than from desktop computers and because mobile advertising
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are growing fast, albeit from a low base. Without a robust mobile
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, Facebook could see some of its users siphoned off by rivals born in the mobile era. And it could miss out on
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massive source of new revenue.
There had been
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that Facebook was working on a phone of its own, or at least on a mobile operating system to rival Android or Apple"s IOS. But dabbling in hardware at this stage of its development would be a huge risk for Facebook and developing a rival operating system would risk
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Apple and Google, whose mobile platforms have helped power its advertising growth, eMarketer, a research firm,
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Facebook is on track to win 11% of the $13.6 billion likely to be spent around the world on mobile ads this year.
Home, which is a group of Facebook apps, avoids both pitfalls. Among other things, it
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a phone"s home screen (and lock screen) to Facebook"s Newsfeed, allowing people to get updates on what their friends are doing without having to launch a
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app each time they want news. A phone using Home will also notify you when your friends are doing something new, as well as alerting you to new data from other apps. Another feature is a tool called "Chat Heads" that
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Facebook"s message system to a phone"s regular SMS message offering. This means messages pop up on the home screen along with the sender"s profile picture, which is enclosed in a small circle.