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Facebook's Three New Products

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Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#91

Post by sevenproxies »

alsocasey wrote: post #86
phillco wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe it's just me, but there seems to be a 10 year gap in your IM technology timeline there. AIM straight to Facebook? Was I the only one using ICQ, MSN, Google Chat before Facebook came along?

>Was I the only one using ICQ, MSN, Google Chat before Facebook came along

I don't know, was you the only person on that service and thus have no-one to talk to?

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#92

Post by rryan »

Newky wrote: post #44

Also, I went with the setup, and not only did facebook not support linux, it doesn't detect I'm on a linux system and started to download a .EXE file! Feeling some pressure from google + ?

And GTalk 1-1 video chat and Google+ Hangouts both support Linux perfectly... looks like Google wins this user's eyeballs.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#94

Post by pbhjpbhj »

michaelchisari wrote: post #14
ssclafani wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you really think that attitude will allow them to maintain their dominance?

IMO it won't be their tech or attitude that will bring an eventual end to their dominance but shear fashion. Trend following. If Google position themselves and look cool and capture the "cool kids" then FB will lose out to them (to some extent). FB is already getting a little taint, it's run a good innings in internet time.

Whichever, G+ or FB, manages to capture the buzz of "hangouts with famous people" will probably take the current round. This to me is the iteration of one of Twitter's big wins; the chance to rub shoulders with "stars".

For me, and I suspect most here, such things don't really matter. I'll stay with FB as long as most of my friends are there and it works reasonably well.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#95

Post by guimarin »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #71
guimarin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I thought what blekko was trying to do was offload the work of building a search index onto its users.

Index technology is very well-known and pretty straightforward. You crawl the web. The quality of your search results are a function of your algorithm, and the depth/breadth of your index (created by this crawling). Blekko is attempting to outsource the algorithm part. Rather than play the cat and mouse game with spam sites, why not let power-users define what the best is, and then only return those results to others. Integrating the social graph is actually an incredibly powerful and compelling way to do search.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#96

Post by pavel_lishin »

nbm wrote: post #80
pavel_lishin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can set up a friends list, and turn on chat only for that friends list, if you like. Set up the friends list at https://www.facebook.com/friends/edit/ and then click the little settings icon at the bottom right (in the new chat design) and choose "Limit availability...". With the old chat design, choose chat at the bottom right, then the "Friend lists" menu item in the chat window, and add the friends list you wa…

I think this discussion made me realize that I want there to be a minimum barrier to contacting me in a way that requires instant feedback. I don't care who has my e-mail address because I can reply to e-mail on my own time and terms, but I'd rather people have to do a little work to contact me via IM, and I want it to be pretty hard for people to casually call me just to chat.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#98

Post by pavel_lishin »

kevindication wrote: post #90
alsocasey wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just me, but there seems to be a 10 year gap in your IM technology timeline there. AIM straight to Facebook? Was I the only one using ICQ, MSN, Google Chat before Facebook came along?

You may have been one of the few using ICQ and MSN after AIM. ICQ was much earlier in the chronology (we used to play with it when we got bored on IRC) and no one used MSN. :-P

I used all of those - and ICQ was still largely my favorite, if only because it supported offline messages.

I think its largest drawback was using account numbers, instead of allowing alphanumeric vanity names.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#99

Post by jonathanjaeger »

siddhant wrote: post #82
pavel_lishin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes but people who are bored and browsing Facebook and don't follow technology minute by minute, outnumber people like us by a huge margin. Facebook launching these three (not so new) features just means that its making video calling more accessible to other people, which means its probably going to work for them. (Personally, I still feel surprised whenever I see anyone even using Facebook chat.)

I use Facebook chat to talk to close friends because sometimes it's more convenient than picking up a phone to talk to someone out of the country. Allows for more random conversations. Having the Skype feature is an added bonus, no one's requiring you to use it. Just because FB chat is more buggy, that doesn't mean the convenience doesn't highly outweigh the disadvantages. Logging into a different chat client would be for chat-only, while FB isn't.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#100

Post by marknutter »

dmbass wrote: post #75
dreamux wrote: 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…

Most people's social graphs are too small (130 people) to be useful. Well we will use an extended social-graph, you might say, but if you are extending the social-graph, why not include the entire internet? Why would my social-graph contain better (more accurate and relevant) information about doing a thing than doathing.com? The social-graph is a reduced set of the internet. It is probably easier to search, but how…

There's a lot of room between the average user's social graph and the entire internet. I think if you got the best 20% of the internet compiled intelligently based on your social graph, you'd be in good shape.
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