Get started at http://www.facebook.com/videocalling
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I'm in the UK. Maybe it hasn't launched here yet?
Facebook's Three New Products
131–140 of 186 posts
Re: Facebook's Three New Products
#132For those drawing comparisons: Facebook has 500 million users. How many does Google+ have?
On the order of 200 000. Mark Zuckerberg has 44871 followers on Google+, so there are clearly at least 44871 users, but probably not more than a few times that.
Yesterday, though, he had 35000 followers. That growth rate clearly can't continue; at that rate, + would overtake FB in another month or two, and the entire world population 5 days later.
Re: Facebook's Three New Products
#133I 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 looks to me like GOOG FB and Apple are trying to get to video calls and own them before the phone companies wake up and realize how valuable their own social graph is. So far the carrier's have had a gold mine and wasted the opportunity.
Re: Facebook's Three New Products
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't need a Skype login, or need to know anyone's Skype login.
That is a killer integration feature. I wonder how this works...
There is some detail in https://www.facebook.com/notes/philip-su/building-video-call... about how the interface between Skype and Facebook works and about the browser plug-in behaviour.
Re: Facebook's Three New Products
#135quote from one commenter: "It sucks! Ask me to download an EXE , while I am in GNU/linux. It is shitty M$ stuff."
Re: Facebook's Three New Products
#136https://www.facebook.com/notes/philip-su/building-video-call...
"Although I was the only full-time engineer on the video calling project, I had help from Paul Shen, Rahul Iyer, and Vijaye Raji."
Re: Facebook's Three New Products
#137I 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.
I think cheap text messaging helped to kill AIM more than Facebook.
Re: Facebook's Three New Products
#138OK, the question I have here is about monetization. Who will get more money from this deal - Facebook or Microsoft/Skype and how? Skype has not been profitable for so many years (although they charge for phone calls and have ads), and I don't see this moving it closer to the goal. Also, if FB allows group video-chat for free why would I pay Skype the subscription fee - I will just call from Facebook.
Skype has been profitable, I think.
Re: Facebook's Three New Products
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 enthusiast…
Livejournal/Facethejury/Friendster These never reached the audience Facebook has today. 750M users and growing, FB won social networking. Game over. 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. I guarantee you this is a very tiny portion. I live with someone who spends lots of time on FB ("Oh, look at this pictures from X…
I don't have the time this afternoon to find hard stats on this, but if you were to plot active userbase over total internet users worldwide for, lets say, AIM & Livejournal c.2004, Friendster c.2006, MySpace c.2008, and Facebook and Twitter currently, I suspect Facebook would appear much less the unstoppable force/immovable object you're making it out to be.
I'm acquainted with hundreds of people like your roommate, and I'm aware that normal people don't give a shit about our geeky critiques of Facebook. What I was trying to communicate is that they likely won't bail on Facebook for those reasons, but they might because there are too many annoying people on Fb, or they don't want to get Faceskyped by their mom, or something that's more interesting or lower friction comes along, or other people move for a variety of reasons and they just follow.
FB won social networking. Game over.
I hate to put it this way, but what are you doing on HN? Seriously. I thought we'd all read The Innovator's Dillema. Nobody wins anything for long, the game's never over. That's sort of the point of capitalism.
Re: Facebook's Three New Products
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
is. I was just all over Central and South America, and internet cafes were always full of high school kids, every single screen full of MSN chat windows.
Indeed, here in Argentina MSN is the default chat application.