I was once a Facebook fool • Hacker News Board

Re: I was once a Facebook fool

#141

Post by jarek » Sat, Sep 24, 2011, 4:30 AM UTC

res0nat0r wrote: post #92

numair wrote: post #88

Wow, well, this got way more attention than I wanted. First, to be clear -- I have nothing against the guy who took Dave Morin's job (who wasn't supposed to be named -- Amazon CloudFront didn't bother to invalidate its cache when I uploaded the final edit of that paper). He played his cards right, came out hundreds of millions of dollars ahead, and then he got out . He's not in this to control your social life or any…

I think comparing Facebook to having access to water or power is a bit of a reach.

Facebook is water for your business if your business is Facebook applications.

Re: I was once a Facebook fool

#142

Post by chrischen » Sat, Sep 24, 2011, 4:49 AM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #134

chrischen wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he's saying Facebook is like water. I think he's saying facebook is NOT like a stable utility like water or power.

From the top-level comment: " this is very basic and very global stuff, similar to water or power, and you shouldn't have to question its integrity. " So yes, unless my English fails me, he is indeed saying that social networking is (or should be) like a utility.

Well he's saying it should be like a utility, but it isn't.

Re: I was once a Facebook fool

#143

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 24, 2011, 4:49 AM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #134

chrischen wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he's saying Facebook is like water. I think he's saying facebook is NOT like a stable utility like water or power.

From the top-level comment: " this is very basic and very global stuff, similar to water or power, and you shouldn't have to question its integrity. " So yes, unless my English fails me, he is indeed saying that social networking is (or should be) like a utility.

[deleted]

Re: I was once a Facebook fool

#144

Post by thinkcomp » Sat, Sep 24, 2011, 5:06 AM UTC

numair wrote: post #88

Wow, well, this got way more attention than I wanted. First, to be clear -- I have nothing against the guy who took Dave Morin's job (who wasn't supposed to be named -- Amazon CloudFront didn't bother to invalidate its cache when I uploaded the final edit of that paper). He played his cards right, came out hundreds of millions of dollars ahead, and then he got out . He's not in this to control your social life or any…

"Facebook is definitely not the company you want operating the world's social infrastructure."

I couldn't agree more. It's too bad that I was never able to get anyone to believe me when I pointed this out at the very beginning, but I'm glad people seem to be paying attention now.

Re: I was once a Facebook fool

#145

Post by cma » Sat, Sep 24, 2011, 5:07 AM UTC

rquantz wrote: post #138

philwelch wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Americans have long left the "rural community" and equate sharecropping with the exploitation of freed slaves after the end of the Civil War.

Thank you. At least in the United States, sharecropping has historical associations with racism and Jim Crow. Suggesting that sharecropping is a low risk way to farm is ignoring the cultural implications if the term. As if former slaves and their descendants made a rational economic decision to become oppressed.

Seems like it is still a bad metaphor then: are Facebook platform developers really analogous to freed slaves?

Re: I was once a Facebook fool

#146

Post by mahyarm » Sat, Sep 24, 2011, 5:07 AM UTC

gaius wrote: post #56

witten wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the more reason not to be a sharecropper and build your application on an open platform. If you know you're working in an environment in which everyone is looking out solely for their own interests, you might as well start out on even footing rather than with a Facebook or Microsoft holding the keys to your project's success.

What open platform? Diaspora is a joke at this point.

Just make facebook a social plugin/driver to your stand alone web app that you can swap out with ease. Make adding your app to G+ be a 1 week/ 2 day project for features available on both.

Re: I was once a Facebook fool

#147

Post by seri » Sat, Sep 24, 2011, 7:01 AM UTC

numair wrote: post #88

Wow, well, this got way more attention than I wanted. First, to be clear -- I have nothing against the guy who took Dave Morin's job (who wasn't supposed to be named -- Amazon CloudFront didn't bother to invalidate its cache when I uploaded the final edit of that paper). He played his cards right, came out hundreds of millions of dollars ahead, and then he got out . He's not in this to control your social life or any…

    There's a reason these guys don't call themselves a 
    "social utility" anymore... But anyway, that's a whole    
    'nother subject

I am reposting my comment on Google+ as it seems relevant to the point raised here:

"""Social networking has two vital utilities. First, it connects people of different geographical locations but of similar interests. The graph of people connected by shared interests is called the interest graph.

Secondly, it enriches existing real life relationships. This is best described within the pre-Facebook era, the era of blogging. At that point, whenever I read a friend's blog, I was always amazed by how much I don't know about him or her. A blog captures something very different about a person, something one can't comprehend even through face to face conversation. In this sense, online social networking is complementing real life social interaction.

In my vision, social networks of the future will continue to push to the limit on each of these fronts. The interest graph is apparently nowhere near complete, and there are opportunities to look for in what is missing through face to face communication, and how software can help with that.

But what Facebook has been doing is much more pervasive than that. They are partly replacing real life interaction. There are less questions to ask of a person as Facebook already shows you whether she has a boyfriend and which bar she went to last night. They are exploiting the narcissism in each and every of us. Every other social network solves a problem and then stays out of our ways. Facebook is trying to become the social life itself."""

Re: I was once a Facebook fool

#148

Post by djeikyb » Sat, Sep 24, 2011, 8:26 AM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #87

raganwald wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I accept that in response to abuses, the practice may have evolved over time. However, that does not in any way diminish the value of the metaphor, because the vast majority of people who encounter the word “sharecropper” think of the kind of farmer who can be evicted after harvest and often were. Further to that, I strongly suspect that most of those who are aware that the practice has evolved since those draconian…

The term computer used to mean a person who sat at a desk doing mathematical calculations. When someone talks about their Amazon computing cluster, I don't picture a huge office building full of people putting pen to paper, crunching numbers all day long, even though that is exactly what computing cluster would have meant at one point in time. When the term sharecropper is used, one will naturally turn to the meaning…

In USAmerican schools, children are taught that sharecropping was an unethical farming practice (ab)used by former slave owners. Perhaps modern day farmers are aware of the modern sharecropping practice, but it certainly isn't taught in schools, nor is it in the common experience.

Re: I was once a Facebook fool

#149

Post by llambda » Sat, Sep 24, 2011, 11:19 AM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #134

chrischen wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he's saying Facebook is like water. I think he's saying facebook is NOT like a stable utility like water or power.

From the top-level comment: " this is very basic and very global stuff, similar to water or power, and you shouldn't have to question its integrity. " So yes, unless my English fails me, he is indeed saying that social networking is (or should be) like a utility.

I believe he means in terms of it being a platform for development. So for instance as a platform for development it might be compared to a utility in which case you wouldn't expect the people that run your water or electric to shut those off because some manager at the plant was playing god. Whereas in Facebook's case this apparently has the potential to happen. Making Facebook a not so attractive platform.

Re: I was once a Facebook fool

#150

Post by nickswan » Sat, Sep 24, 2011, 12:21 PM UTC

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #94

timr wrote: post #70

It's not especially interesting that Facebook made a deal for a music app (and subsequently supported that deal over a competitor). This is business, not charity. What's interesting to me is that iLike -- the success story of early platform days -- was being promoted heavily from within Facebook itself. If you read the press at that time, you'd have been excused for thinking that the Partovi brothers were the victims…

If everyone had known from the start that Facebook would make that kind of deal and kick all other apps of the same kind out, it would have been OK. But running a platform that is supposedly governed by rules and then using underhand tactics like these to kill apps arbitrarily is not OK. It puts a big question mark on Facebook as a platform and I think the author of the article is right that everyone should think ver…

You run this risk when you build on or using any type of platform. If you build something that is hugely successful you might get acquired by the platform provider, or if it's cheaper they might build it themselves.