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.
Apple does this every release. Marketing is important. Facebook is now the ubiquitous video chat social network, built on Skype. Google+ is Circles on your Gmail. Everything else you say requires some level of convincing.
Facebook is showing the signs of its alliance to Microsoft in more ways than one here.
Apple does this every release. Marketing is important. Facebook is now the ubiquitous video chat social network, built on Skype. Google+ is Circles on your Gmail. Everything else you say requires some level of convincing.
Facebook is showing the signs of its alliance to Microsoft in more ways than one here.
I see one way (using Skype, although apparently that started some time ago). What are the other ways?
That's not even worth wasting time at answering. Look Google doing a great job of rebranding it's services. Google already had video chat for a while now. If you have gmail you have video chat. I don't get why facebook is just getting around to doing it. And google didn't need skype to do it.
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GrandCentral was the voicemail service they purchased and has nothing to do with video chat.
Despite all of the hype about video chat and circles versus lists, to me the big announcement looks like group chat - which seems kind of stupidly obvious. Thinking about it, Google may have missed the mark by throwing video into the equation - unlike is the case with video, when people don't have to get dressed to be part of a discussion based on text. It almost looks like Google heard that Facebook was working on group features and video and assumed that they would be integrated.
Facebook doesn't need to have competitive features they only need to have comparative features. Google+ has video chat, now Facebook does. It doesn't matter that Hangout is better. People don't switch social networks based on any single feature.
Facebook didn't have to be very good when their main competitors were MySpace and Friendster, two poster children for incompetence who blew early leads in quick succession while at times appearing to be run by circus clowns. Fortunately for Facebook success is relative: for a site whose primary purpose is to manage your social network it's been sorely lacking in any credible tools to manage social networks. Facebook…
One of the reasons for FB's victory was that its design is staid, standard, but stable compared to the script injection nightmare that MySpace's customization turned into. For all of Zuckerberg's youthful personality (at least as portrayed by the media), it almost feels like Facebook has had a dry corporate juggernaut type ethos from the beginning. FB didn't so much innovate as much as it dominated by creating a cleaner, better-ordered social network. No wonder its color scheme is big blue.
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…
You are very right about certain groups of people thinking Facebook is the Internet.
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…
It’s for people who already spend a lot of time on Facebook. They don’t have to bother anymore using dedicated software. Simple as that. You are looking at it from the wrong perspective.
He's clearly being purposefully obstructive in his comments. Obviously if you're on FB already then why open Skype, why open an IM client, that's how integration works.
The parent is asking the equivalent of why you'd add maps to google when you have a perfectly good road map out in the car.
Facebook just works pretty darn well, though. The application is almost always responsive, it's extremely polished, and it's always getting a bit stronger in what it offers. If that's underachieving, sign me up.
"Facebook just works pretty darn well" i guess you have never interacted with their platform/api?
Shallow api integration (like button, send button) just works pretty darn well.
You are correct, though. I, along with most people who use facebook, haven't had to do any deeper platform/api integration.
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 one area where FB has a distinct early advantage (they have more mature social graphs).
Doesn't not having a search engine trump having a big social graph when it comes to search? Building search engines is not trivially easy. It took Microsoft 10 years to get it right.
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…
When I was in high school, almost everyone used AIM. Then Facebook Chat came out and practically crushed it. Why? It wasn't better (it was far, far, worse, actually — you couldn't chat with somebody without one of you complaining about it), but everyone was there . It became the defacto way to reach people. It was successful for the same reason Facebook was successful.
> everyone was there
This is exactly why I turned chat off. I have no desire to be contacted by old high school classmates who happen to be bored and browsing facebook, and see me pop up.