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Facebook's Three New Products

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Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#101

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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…

>but how will the results be better than Google?

You have control of your own social graph, you don't have control over who puts a page up for Google to crawl. You're using the authority someone has as part of your network to filter what comes in to the network - search only on sites that friends-of-friends have recommended and you're unlikely to get spam or sites that are hard to navigate or that won't provide a good service. If I'm looking for new outdoor equipment I could look at the online stores that fellow scouts have used and recommended and so save time weeding out the better stores.

Just my immediate reaction to your question. There are clearly benefits in both types of search. Also this presupposes that FB aren't trying to inject advertised offerings in to your social-graph based search; probably a bad assumption as that there looks like gold to me.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#102

Post by sbochins »

pstack wrote: post #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…

Yea I was surprised they put the "show most chatty friends in chat list" as a product. That seems like a very small feature. Adding people to group chat? I thought you could already do this, but I don't really use Facebook chat too much. Seems very underwhelming to say the least.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#103

Post by RobAtticus »

MartinCron wrote: post #50
michaelchisari wrote: post #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.

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.

You're a lucky one I guess, or I'm unlucky. Facebook has constant little issues, whether it's just plain slow, the back button doesn't do anything, clicking a link doesn't do anything, chat is always on the fritz, or some other annoyance.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#104

Post by guimarin »

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…

I think you are mistaking how to integrate the social graph into search. You don't do it by exclusively searching within the social graph, you use the social graph to augment your traditional search. The best way for me to show you what I mean is for you to look at the attempts blekko is making. Create an account, and connect your facebook profile, wait 1 hour, and then do searches with "/likes" appended. You'll still get mostly normal results but the instances where a friend has liked a site will be featured more prominently. Facebook has not been able to "just make a search engine" with the social graph because making a traditional search engine is a non-trivial challenge.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#105

Post by kenjackson »

cryptoz wrote: post #88
kenjackson wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see one way (using Skype, although apparently that started some time ago). What are the other ways?

Downloading .exe files to Linux computers seems to be a very Microsofty thing to do.

I SERIOUSLY doubt MS was giving them architectural guidance on how to make this work. Probably would have more to do with the architectural experience of the devs.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#106

Post by Ryanmf »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #28
benbscholz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The video features built into gchat have served my needs perfectly 1) The average person knows more people on Facebook, then people with a Gmail account. 2) You, and your other geeky friends live in Gmail. The rest of the world lives inside Facebook.

The rest of the world lives inside Facebook.

For now.

To me, there's exactly one compelling thing about Facebook: It illustrated that normal humans will join and use a social network.

Beyond that, I don't see any reason why their adoption patterns will differ from those we've already seen with other humans on other "social" web properties (Hi Livejournal/Facethejury/Friendster et al!). Which is to say, the enthusiastic folks eventually get those who joined begrudgingly involved, everyone has fun for a while, then everyone gets bored and moves on.

It's not as if nerds who have SRS PRIVACY CONCERNZ and talk about things like data portability are the only people growing weary of Facebook. An approximate majority of the musicians/DJs/artists I know in real life and on the internet say they hate Facebook but maintain an account for promotional purposes. But they all seem to have really warmed up to Twitter. (Specifically, most in the music crowd seem to have adopted a combination of Twitter and Soundcloud as their primary internet residencies, filling the void where MySpace once resided.)

To assume that Facebook will remain the social network of note just because they're Facebook, or just because they got there first (sort of) seems naïve.

The network effect will be the primary driver of where we all—geeks and normies alike—end up next. Facebook doesn't really have any control over that. And we've seen that the network effect can linger even after the product has effectively failed (Hi MySpace!), so having the network now may not be a reliable indicator that they'll keep it, even in the very near term.

And that leaves the product. Which is fine, I guess. Not that bad, not that great. But when Google announces their first real crack at a genuine social network and it has features no one's even talked about yet, and it's cooked directly into their mobile platform running on about 180 Mm devices worldwide [1][2], Facebook's "awesome" reply, "We've got video chat now," falls flat. To me at least.

[1] http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1622614 [2] Android/Google+ and some of the new iOS 5 features along with Apple's Twitter partnership have me semi-convinced that we're moving towards the transparent social network, where membership has much more to do with which smartphone you buy than anything else. I predict that in a competition with Google and Apple/Twitter, Microsoft/Facebook will turn out to be also-rans. Also, poor RIM.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#107

Post by adrianwaj »

Apocryphon wrote: post #65
vannevar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clea…

FB became quite awesome when they integrated Friendfeed's technology and the stream became quick and much more transparent in terms of usability.

At the same time, when Buzz came out, it was even faster and cleaner. Just not placed in the right context. There must have been some lessons and technology learned from Buzz.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#109

Post by RobAtticus »

brudgers wrote: post #64

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 g…

Gmail has had group chat for a long time. G+ has it on the mobile app, and really you could join a hangout and use the text chat feature for group chat as well (even without a mic/webcam). I'm not sure why the G+ in-browser gchat doesn't support group chat, but I would guess it probably will.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#110

Post by felideon »

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

MSN was (is?) pretty popular in Latin America. I had 0 "real life" friends on AIM. My few AIM buddies were people I met in games.
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