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Facebook's Three New Products

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Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#141

Post by toddy »

Zakuzaa wrote: post #138
toddy wrote: post #117

OK, 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.

No. Skype lost ~$7M last year and has close to $700M in debt. This was the biggest objection on the price MS paid to acquire it. See http://mashable.com/2011/05/10/microsoft-acquires-skype/

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#143

Post by muuh-gnu »

rapind wrote: post #112
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 probabl…

This. I sent my wife the intro link for Google+ when they launched and she couldn't even be bothered to check it out. Why? Because everyone she knows is on facebook. If her friends move, then she'll move. It'll probably annoy her to have to switch too.

> If her friends move, then she'll move.

And every of her friends will move if the other friends move, etc. But in reality, it is enough if only one of her friends, the most influential one moves, and then all the worker bees will follow.

> Because everyone she knows is on facebook.

But why is everyone on facebook in the first place? Because one of them, the group leader, the early adopter, the trend setter, decided first, then the rest passively followed. If the trend setter again decides to go G+, the effort to move off Facebook will be less then losing the queen bee, so they will follow again.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#144

Post by ConstantineXVI »

RobAtticus wrote: post #109
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.

It does, it has a little "Add Person" button in chat windows. Same as Gmail does.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#145

Post by sunchild »

kenjackson wrote: post #62
sunchild wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Things I see them both doing: playing catch-up, stumbling on user experience, appealing to the lowest common denominator rather than the leading edge.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#147

Post by AlexandrB »

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 think this is somewhat regional. I'm from Canada, and no one I know uses AIM. MSN seems to be the most common chat program, although Skype is increasing in popularity.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#148

Post by matwood »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #118
Ryanmf wrote: post #106

Earlier 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…

FB won social networking. Game over.

Youngsters today and the lack of history being taught in schools. History is full of winners, who after a period of time became losers (or at least not the same level of winning).

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#149

Post by ipince »

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.

I certainly does _not_ work pretty darn well. A couple examples of high-impact bugs:

- Repeated posts in the news feed. The first ~10 posts or so in the news feed are repeated as you scroll down.

- In the news feed, if I see and play a video, it plays. Great. If I continue going down the feed and then click on a photo, it goes into the "theater" mode, and for some obscure reason, it plays the video again (except I cannot see it; I can only hear it). The only way to stop it is to exit theater mode. This keeps happening over and over again every time I enter theater mode. I am then forced to refresh the entire page if I want to see some pictures without distracting noise in the background.

These are just a couple examples; there are many more. After talking to some friends, it seems I'm not the only one experiencing them. Now, nobody's perfect. It's OK if these bugs got into production for a few days or even weeks before getting fixed. But it's been months now... For a company full of brilliant engineers, that is unacceptable.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#150

Post by matwood »

guimarin wrote: post #95
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Basically returning results and ordering by the +1s your social graph has possibly already marked?
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