Facebook and Apple should do a CEO swap. Zuck spends a day at Apple consulting on whatever Steve wants his input on, and vice versa.
It's foolproof!
Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
31–40 of 73 posts
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#32"Joel Seligstein, a Facebook engineer, is relieved he no longer needs to keep track of which friends like texts vs. email vs. chat." Joel seems to wrongly assume that the preference is defined by the person alone. Whereas more often than not, the medium is defined by the nature of the message and the sender _is_ the best judge. - It is an opaque abstraction to not let me choose the medium to deliver in.
Yes, that is my point. Abstracting away SMS vs. email is an interesting intellectual exercise, but it doesn't solve any user problems. The sender is the best judge of what transport to use. It's unfortunate, but it's the way the world is today.
> It's unfortunate, but it's the way the world is today.
You're saying it as if it's a bad thing.
Email is asynchronous. IM and SMS are disruptive.
And on IM versus SMS, the sender of a SMS usually doesn't know if the recipient received the message, while the default behavior of IM is to notify your contacts list if you're online.
These are different mediums people use for different kinds of communication / contacts.
But I don't expect Facebook to get this, especially considering their total disregard of the way people interact with one another. It's a wonder they are number #1, but I guess the alternatives sucked a lot more.
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#33Everyone I know just uses facebook on their phones. No need for all this integration, I think SMS is old here in the UK, people still use it, but it's fading away.
You can get unlimited internet on your phone for an extra fiver, or tenner a month.
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#34People keep saying Zuckerberg/Facebook doesn't know what they're doing. Yet competitors keep falling and Facebook keeps growing. Maybe things aren't so obvious?
Facebook keeps growing because of network effects, not because of all the great things they do IMHO.
Maybe now (and that's a big maybe.) But there were at least several years of growth during which Facebook could've been "taken down".
Besides, MySpace also had a huge network effect, and lost to Facebook.
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#35SMS and email are different. SMS costs $ per message. Email does not. In the Facebook UI, if you add a SMS user to an email thread, he will receive numerous SMSes from email users who don't realize that they're racking up his bill.
Wait a minute, is that true? Do you pay for receiving text messages in the US? That does seem a little crazy from a European perspective.
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook keeps growing because of network effects, not because of all the great things they do IMHO.
Maybe now (and that's a big maybe.) But there were at least several years of growth during which Facebook could've been "taken down". Besides, MySpace also had a huge network effect, and lost to Facebook.
Just because Facebook won over mySpace doesn't mean that they won because they did great things. They did things differently (and apparently just what was needed).
But just as people for quite some time accepted the shortcomings of mySpace until a better alternative came along, people will (and already do) accept the shortcomings of FaceBook because of it's size.
In other words. FB's introduction of various features and products work because they are big and because of the networks effects.
Case in point "Like"
"Like" is not by any metrics new or unique. It's just much more powerful when a company like FB introduces it because of their size. That goes with many other things they have introduced.
Fmail is just a freaking communication tool.
It's not solving anything new. It's taking advantage of it's ecosystem to provide something useful and unique, because of size of the network not because of the actual solution.
And that is fine. Good for FaceBook.
But let's not confuse what is a product of network effect and size with innovative thinking.
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#37This argument would be more compelling if Apple Mail weren't so awful.
I don't know, I've always liked Apple Mail, simple and to the point. I do use MailTags though (http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html)...
Before that, I used to use Foxmail, then Thunderbird and then Evolution and none of them have been as good as Apple Mail
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#38SMS and email are different. SMS costs $ per message. Email does not. In the Facebook UI, if you add a SMS user to an email thread, he will receive numerous SMSes from email users who don't realize that they're racking up his bill. Wait a minute, is that true? Do you pay for receiving text messages in the US? That does seem a little crazy from a European perspective.
Perhaps he meant that the users who are sending the message [to the "email list" with an SMS number on it] will pay.
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#39SMS and email are different. SMS costs $ per message. Email does not. In the Facebook UI, if you add a SMS user to an email thread, he will receive numerous SMSes from email users who don't realize that they're racking up his bill. Wait a minute, is that true? Do you pay for receiving text messages in the US? That does seem a little crazy from a European perspective.
Perhaps he meant that the users who are sending the message [to the "email list" with an SMS number on it] will pay.
I dunno, I'm in canada before I got my unlimited txt plan, its 15c per txt to receive and 15c per txt to send. Its highway robbery.
Re: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
#40SMS and email are different. SMS costs $ per message. Email does not. In the Facebook UI, if you add a SMS user to an email thread, he will receive numerous SMSes from email users who don't realize that they're racking up his bill. Wait a minute, is that true? Do you pay for receiving text messages in the US? That does seem a little crazy from a European perspective.
Many US mobile/cell plans include paying for receiving text messages.
Clearly no-one in the US gets any text message spam, or they'd be _really_ angry about paying to receive that.