Tweetie and ‘pull-to-refresh’ creator Loren Brichter reportedly working with a Facebook team

According to a tweet from Facebook’s Mike Matas this morning, the company’s new social home screen project has gained itself a hot collaborator. Matas says that developer and designer Loren Brichter is ‘helping out’ his team at Facebook.

As the creator of the much-loved Tweetie for Mac, Brichter was snapped up by Twitter and worked for a while to integrate his apps with the service, where they eventually became Twitter for Mac and iPhone. Brichter has gained notoriety for his unique and clever user interface work on both Tweetie and later his word game Letterpress.

Now it looks like he’ll be working on bringing some of his design expertise to Facebook, perhaps in a capacity as a consultant helping to refine its user interface or on the Facebook Home project.

Really excited to have @lorenb helping my team out at Facebook.

— Mike Matas (@mike_matas) April 16, 2013

Brichter has been called a ‘high priest’ of app design by Wall Street Journal and his ‘side project’ Letterpress was so popular that it broke Apple’s Game Center for a time.

As to why Brichter might be helping the team out; the early feedback on Facebook Home has been fairly mixed, with a lot of negative reviews on Google Play for the standalone app. The complaints of many center around the interface and the way that it subsumes the home screen, obscuring information like battery and signal strength. Perhaps Facebook knows it needs some help to balance the needs of ‘home screen’ lovers and Facebook lovers.

We’ve reached out to Facebook and Brichter for more information.

Note: For the purposes of this piece, I’d initially assumed that Matas was working with the Facebook Home team, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. If he’s working on a separate project within the company then Brichter could have been brought on for that instead. The piece has been amended to reflect that.