Constant, close contact with your friends. That’s the promise of a “Facebook phone”. The modified Android OS and mobile homescreen replacement sources tell us Facebook will unveil April 4th pushes your social life to you so fetching it isn’t interruptive. The News feed brought us ambient intimacy, but Facebook’s homescreen could turn that social graph awareness into a sixth sense.

While it only take a quarter minute each time, reaching for your phone, waking it from sleep, firing up the Facebook app, and loading your latest notifications does pull you out of the present. Checking the news feed for the latest photos and stories from your friend is a conscious decision. You’re either living your life, or reading Facebook. The social network would surely prefer those to be one and the same.

If that data automatically fed right into your homescreen, every time you opened your phone you’d be instantly up to date on conversations with friends, and get a peek into their lives. And if Facebook can pipe this content into the lockscreen, it’d be even more immersive, like a true heads-up display. It’s a deeper way to plug in, where the shell disappears and your gain a more visceral connection to the people you care about.

This is the purpose of what Facebook plans to launch next week, which my sources got me the scoop on right when the big press event was announced yesterday. It’s a Facebook-ified homescreen that will be shown off on an HTC handset running a version of Android modified by Facebook, similar to what Amazon did to create the Kindle operating system.

Making Facebook an indigenous resident of your phone’s homescreen could accelerate your social life. It might reduce the time it takes you to respond to messages or continue a comment thread. If a friend is down the street, Facebook could have a better chance of advising you to join them. Giving Facebook a way to tell you more directly about what’s going on in your immediate vicinity could be important as it focuses more on local discovery.

Read the full article: TechCrunch