Facebook's Three New Products • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#151

Post by r00fus » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 8:56 PM UTC

guimarin wrote: post #104

dmbass wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stil…

Hasn't google already taken a huge step towards this with their +1 initiative (which is obviously tied to G+)?

With Google's velocity, I think they're probably going to get to "social search" first (good luck to Blekko, but reliance on FB is not going to scale - especially when FB looks to monetize - social search is their meal ticket).

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#152

Post by bonch » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 9:01 PM UTC

nextparadigms wrote: post #46

kenjackson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except that Hangout is a lot more social than the Facebook/Skype integration. Google+ has out-social'ed Facebook.

"A lot more social" is pretty vague.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#153

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 9:24 PM UTC

nbm wrote: post #134

r00fus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#154

Post by smackfu » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 9:28 PM UTC

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.

Yes, it's odd. I agree with you, from my perspective, Facebook has 100% uptime and virtually no bugs. It's as good as Google (maybe better since GMail is often crappy for me.) It's clear that others see very different things. I wonder what the difference is?

(Now the Facebook iPhone app is really buggy, I will give you that.)

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#155

Post by Creyels » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 9:30 PM UTC

I think it's quiet interesting how quickly things change and how you see companies differently and google reinvented their image in such a short period of time.

If you asked me a year ago if I would say which was the cooler, younger, more innovative and most promising company - Google or Facebook - I would have said 4:0 Facebook for sure.

Now, I would say:

Cooler? I have a passion for design - so Google+ is by far winner here. In addition, you can say what you want, but with the invitation restriction they got what they wanted - buzzed.

Younger? When you compare the new design from Google to the Facebook design and consider the implementation of cutting edge web technology (advanced html5 etc.) - for sure it's google!

More innovative? Of course Facebook has a point for focusing the development of a framework in which other companies can build on - but on the other hand, that's by definition not much innovation by themselves - so google+!

Most promising? Only time can tell..

I don't know exactly why I see Google in a whole new light now.

Maybe it's because of their stunning design and UX (sorry for repeating, but it's gorgeous), maybe it's because of their underdog position with Google+ or maybe it's because Facebook with it's dry and subtle and boring design and it's cooperations with "uncool" players like microsoft is not taking risks anymore. They cannot risk their large userbase and got to stay mainstream. That could be the chance for Google+ to conquer, at least, the younger crowd.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#156

Post by whatusername » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 9:43 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #70

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.

> 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.

Look into facebook groups. A bit of a pain to setup (especially compared to circles) - but it gives you quick ways to limit the news-feed to only a subset of friends or to limit who can see you online.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#157

Post by contextfree » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 9:51 PM UTC

felideon wrote: post #110

kevindication wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding is that MSN was/is the most popular IM service most everywhere but the US (because of AIM?) and East Asia (where they have their own regionally popular services, like QQ in China).

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#158

Post by cphang » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 9:58 PM UTC

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 + ?

It detected my Mac OS X just fine, asked me to execute a Java Applet and then make my Firefox crashed.

I restarted Facebook using Chromium and stared a Video Call. It works like charm.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#159

Post by contextfree » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 9:58 PM UTC

cryptoz wrote: post #111

kenjackson wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn't suggesting that MS told them to do that. To my knowledge, this first time that Facebook has left the Web and launched a feature only available to specific OSs by way of desktop applications. Remember that this video chat is not a web page. It's a Microsoft (and Apple? I don't know) desktop application that integrates into their web page. I'm suggesting that Facebook is showing their alliance to Microsoft by…

Did Google show their alliance to Microsoft when they released Chrome for Windows well ahead of other platforms?

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#160

Post by chrischen » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 10:04 PM UTC

phillco wrote: post #51

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…

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.

When I was in school everyone used MSN and then later when I switched AIM. Still use them, because those people are still there. Have really mostly ignored facebook chat, and fbchat also does not show user status messages.

They've basically just brought facebook chat on par with instant messengers from the 2000s except you have to install something additional for video chat.