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Facebook's Three New Products

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Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#2
Given their social networking dominance, their swimming pools filled with vc money, and the top engineers working for them, does anyone else feel like Facebook are underachievers?

Considering they had to have known about G+ for a while before it launched, you would think they would really hit something out of the park in terms of competitive features. These are all pretty lackluster, imho.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#4

Given their social networking dominance, their swimming pools filled with vc money, and the top engineers working for them, does anyone else feel like Facebook are underachievers? Considering they had to have known about G+ for a while before it launched, you would think they would really hit something out of the park in terms of competitive features. These are all pretty lackluster, imho.

G+ launched with Group video chat (in the Hangouts feature) with no fanfare at all, as it if was nothing.

FB's announcement today has spent a lot of time talking about how much work it was to implement...

It's got to be a huge kick in the pants to them. I kind of feel bad for them.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#5

Given their social networking dominance, their swimming pools filled with vc money, and the top engineers working for them, does anyone else feel like Facebook are underachievers? Considering they had to have known about G+ for a while before it launched, you would think they would really hit something out of the park in terms of competitive features. These are all pretty lackluster, imho.

The video features built into gchat have served my needs perfectly. Between hangouts & youtube video sharing, I think google+ is out-shining them at this point in time.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#6
post #3

Is it me or does Zuckerberg really excel at being boring? I guess I don't watch many CEOs announce new products but that was painfully boring and pedantic.

His voice is a bit whiny, and that isn't helping. But I think it's also the slide-show based presentation. And the repeatedly talking about how awesome his partners and employees are. We get it. We didn't come here for that. We want to be shown the exciting features.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#7
post #3

Is it me or does Zuckerberg really excel at being boring? I guess I don't watch many CEOs announce new products but that was painfully boring and pedantic.

His voice is a bit whiny, and that isn't helping. But I think it's also the slide-show based presentation. And the repeatedly talking about how awesome his partners and employees are. We get it. We didn't come here for that. We want to be shown the exciting features.

I understand fully his motives, drum up support and excitement about his IPO, but no matter how hard he tries, he does not have Jobs charisma or skill. He should start getting it by reading Nancy Duarte's books on presentations.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#8
While I can appreciate (in fact, I probably don't) the technical difficulty of delivering a chat/video service to a userbase of 750M; these simply aren't compelling innovations for most (especially younger) people. Of particular note, these features aren't sticky (the usability of these features is common to _many_ other services) nor do they raise particularly high barriers to entry for competitors (Google has already nailed these services at large scales, integrating them into G+ is probably trivial). What FB (or Google for that matter) needs to nail is social search based on the graph of what your friends are doing/reading/buying... this is one area where FB has a distinct early advantage (they have more mature social graphs). I'm convinced social search will be the single feature that displaces or entrenches FB, not chat.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#9
post #8

While I can appreciate (in fact, I probably don't) the technical difficulty of delivering a chat/video service to a userbase of 750M; these simply aren't compelling innovations for most (especially younger) people. Of particular note, these features aren't sticky (the usability of these features is common to _many_ other services) nor do they raise particularly high barriers to entry for competitors (Google has alrea…

this is exactly what www.blekko.com is trying to do.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#10
I don't see any products, there. I just see a couple of lame features. Skype and group chat. Skype already does Skype, so I'm not sure why I'd load up Facebook just so I could skype through a webpage, instead. My IM client has done group chat for years, so I'm not sure why I'd load up facebook just so I could chat with a group of those people, either.

This kind of falls in line with my confusion as to why people ruin their websites with all these components and hooks into Facebook. They claim that they need Facebook Likes and Logins and Discussions in their websites, because Facebook drives traffic. Even if they hate it, they have to succumb to it. You know, for generating traffic. My question remains - why do you want to try appealing to a group of people to whom Facebook is "the internet" and who do everything through Facebook? Those people aren't going to make a point of going to your website again, unless someone links them to it a second time down the road. It seems like a lot of resources (not to mention website screen real-estate) given up for very little desirable return.

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