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Facebook's Three New Products

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Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#161

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> 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.)

It's making it slightly more accesible. People you generally would be willing to make a video call to are probably already on your skype, phone, or other contacts.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#162

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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.

Yea same with me. In Canada we used MSN and when I moved back to the US it was AIM, even though MSN felt like a much better product.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#163

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> 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.

Sure, but that's extra work, and the people I'd allow to see my presence generally can reach me in other ways.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#164

Looks like video chat is the hot new battleground again. Facebook Skype vs. video GChat vs. Apple FaceTime/iChat/iMessage vs. Microsoft Skype(?)

This actually has piqued my interest. I'll try to build a video chat app as my next quarterly app push. I'll let you guys know how it goes.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#166
The comment stream is interesting, particulary because I've been seeing a lot of "google + hasn't made any impact outside tech circles" type comments around the place. People are looking at this just as Google would like them too.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#167

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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.

So it does. I have it signed out (I don't need my gchat's going to 4 different places), so I turned it on briefly and failed to notice that. Thanks for pointing that out!

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#169
post #139

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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,…

I hate to put it this way, but what are you doing on HN? Seriously.

I apologize if I offended you, Ryan. All I am asking for is for an example of one company that had reach the sort of mass FB has (coupled with a total dominance in its vertical)and ended up loosing to a competitor. Enlighten me.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#170

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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.

So what is your point exactly? That the only reason people will stay on Facebook is that they already are on Facebook? By this logic they never would have gotten on Facebook in the first place, because Facebook started out empty, and everybody already was somwhere else, say MySpace, and ICQ/AIM/YIM/MSN before that.

So what is your point exactly? That the only reason people will stay on Facebook is that they already are on Facebook

Yes. Your neighbor's mama was never on Myspace, ICQ, AIM, YIM, MSN, and chances are she is not on Gmail video chatting.

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