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Facebook's Three New Products

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Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#171

Post by temphn »

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…

All your friends are on Facebook, so you don't have to search/find them on Skype. N-to-N video communication is now much easier. Default will be to use FB rather than the Skype client, especially once they add voice calls, conference calls, and group video chat.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#172

Post by rapind »

muuh-gnu wrote: post #143
rapind wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I totally agree.

I'm wondering what made the group leaders adopt? Was it features? Trendy name and logo? Did it seem like the hip thing to do? Exclusivity / scarcity?

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#173

Post by swaits »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #163
whatusername wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then don't use it! Seriously, you said the problem was that you didn't want anyone contacting you. But the fact is that FB does this quite well, and it's not that much work. And, it's damn convenient. I, awhile ago, basically switched over to it completely, as it integrates into my Jabber client quite nicely. Now people know if they want to contact me, they should use FB IM.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#174

Post by swaits »

ugh wrote: post #11
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…

It’s for people who already spend a lot of time on Facebook. They don’t have to bother anymore using dedicated software. Simple as that. You are looking at it from the wrong perspective.

FB chat has a jabber interface. It can be used by those of us who don't sit on FB all day too. Pretty convenient. Now, I hope they'll get the group chat working via jabber too.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#175

Post by Nagyman »

nasht wrote: post #133
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…

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.

The carriers would have had to work together to seize the social space. Instead, they'll just charge $15/month for the "Unlimited Social Package"

E.g. http://www.bell.ca/shopping/en_CA_ON.Unlimited-Social-Networ...

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#176

Post by tesseract »

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…

I agree with what you said, but: remember when the Facebook "Wall" was just a graffiti wall, a big text box that any of your friends could edit?

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#177

Post by tesseract »

matwood wrote: post #150
guimarin wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If I search for "2011 movies", that sounds great.

If I search for "digital camera", it might help a bit but if I were looking for the opinions of my photographer friends, I'd just ask them.

If I search for "us air strikes in libya" it might help but I would expect an algorithm to be able to find me some decent news articles without too much help from my friends. Besides, I don't want to live in my friends' 'filter bubble'.

If I search for "AT91SAM9G20 datasheet", I doubt anyone in my immediate social graph has even seen what I'm looking for, let alone +1'd it.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#178

Post by salemh »

rapind wrote: post #172
muuh-gnu wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I totally agree. I'm wondering what made the group leaders adopt? Was it features? Trendy name and logo? Did it seem like the hip thing to do? Exclusivity / scarcity?

Large marketing firms dedicate resources to finding "trend setters" and "cool kids". http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3...

Older video: "Merchants of Cool" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/

Or look at a Goog search "marketing trendsetters | "trend-setter"

Lots of noise. The Merchants of Cool is a good relevant watch.

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#179

Post by pstack »

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.

IM is always running in the background. Facebook requires going to the website and logging in and monitoring it. And being "available" to a huge swath of people. Not to mention, all of my colleagues and co-workers are on IM. I'm not going to reach out to a colleague to ask about a client via facebook chat and I'm not going to communicate with a client via facebook, instead of IM.

In short, Facebook likely contains everyone you've ever met or dealt with in person or online and "friended" that can potentially chat with you -- IM likely contains only the people you actually need to chat with.

"Everyone is there" is becoming an increasingly poor reason to justify selling your soul to a particular social network (as an individual or a business).

Re: Facebook's Three New Products

#180

Post by wonnage »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #169
Ryanmf wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yahoo
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