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Facebook buys Parse

techcrunch.com

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Re: Facebook buys Parse

#221

Post by lmm »

argonaut wrote: post #119
smrtinsert wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has a mindshare problem. I no longer consider it a driving force in my social interaction and I'm of the older generation. The younger generation seems to have abandoned it already. It's now a deposit for the occasional family photo and lately seems to be full of chain spam. When you think back to the history of social networks (AOL, Compuserv, Friendster, Myspace) these things don't have a great half-life.…

Totally disagree. I'm in college right now and Facebook+Instagram are still the social networks of choice. If anything Facebook has only lost it's novelty because it's assumed everyone has one. The only thing that sucks up more of my time is Hacker News :)

> If anything Facebook has only lost it's novelty because it's assumed everyone has one.

Sometimes I think every social network is doomed to die in a certain number of years. Facebook simply isn't cool any more because everybody's on it now, which mean's it's ripe for disruption by a network of cool people.

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#222

Post by lmm »

anoncow wrote: post #191
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, this. Shutting down services is different to restricting services to your own platform. Perhaps you have a point, perhaps Google would hypothetically have decided to shut down Parse had they acquired it, but it's not fair to suggest they'd have limited it to Android.

Doesn't make business sense to ignore the scores using iOS.

If it drives users away from iOS then it does. Apple is the biggest threat to google.

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#223

Post by randartie »

newhouseb wrote: post #220
dweekly wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bummer. Can I ask why this changed your mind? At FB, we're quite serious about finding ways to gift third party developers with APIs, tools, open source, platforms, whatever we can do to help. I think Parse is pretty awesome and is likely to become more so at Facebook. That's a useless opinion if it's not shared by the wider community, though. So: feedback taken seriously - we're listening. Fire away.

> gift third party developers with APIs... Phrasing like this concerns me. When making platform decisions, I would very much like greater assurance that there is an expectation of how a relationship matures than you would find in a "gifting" scenario. I feel like sometimes the attitude from Facebook has been "We're giving all of this stuff away for free! What is there to complain about?" Free means no expectation of…

I think the word gift and give in this context are interchangeable. Sounds like you found a word to pick at and are now just hating Facebook for the sake of it. (You managed to extrapolate that Facebook has 0 assumed reliability because he used the word gift.)

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#224

Post by sarbogast »

dweekly wrote: post #126
oneplusone wrote: post #4

Damn. I was going to use Parse for my app, but now I will not. What are some of the alternatives out there?

Bummer. Can I ask why this changed your mind? At FB, we're quite serious about finding ways to gift third party developers with APIs, tools, open source, platforms, whatever we can do to help. I think Parse is pretty awesome and is likely to become more so at Facebook. That's a useless opinion if it's not shared by the wider community, though. So: feedback taken seriously - we're listening. Fire away.

I've been using Parse with great pleasure as well for a couple of months and I really want to keep using it because their API is really beautiful and their design is absolutely gorgeous. But the past event that worries me is the acquisition of face.com. Right after the acquisition, they assured everyone it would stay up and they would continue to support it for all the developers who integrated its facial recognition API into their apps. And just a couple of months later, they announced they would fully absorb and kill it as an independent service. Today, the domain doesn't even lead anywhere. Now I know that the scope and impact of Face.com were way less than those of Parse, but still, you can't blame us for worrying.

One thing that would personally reassure me would be for Facebook to add a "non-hosted" offering to Parse, which means the ability to download Parse's application and install it on my own server. If this was available I would keep using Parse as a hosted service knowing that in the event that Facebook decides to shut it down at some point, I can export all my data and have it running on my own infrastructure.

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#225

Post by styrmis »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #165
vabmit wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this, too. I still log into FB often. But, my FB feed is dead. Only 1 of my 100+ friends still posts something regularly (every week or two). At first, I just thought people created filters that didn't include me (when that feature was introduced). But, they're just not using FB anymore. Thinking back, I almost totally stopped posting stuff around the time they did because the site just began to feel cre…

Uh, your sample is wayyyy different from mine. There are six posts in the last hour just by people I'm close to. I don't think Facebook is dying in any sense of the word among normal people.

Normal people eh? ;)

Speaking of late to the party Facebook is just in the process of taking off here in Japan, it's already very popular and appears to be taking over from social networks like Mixi which have previously dominated here.

I don't have any numbers to back this up though, I'm just basing it on the change in usage I've seen here in the last two years. Certainly Facebook is alive and well here, even _useful_ if you can imagine it!

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#227

Post by avichal »

swombat wrote: post #217
csmajorfive wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I apprehend it and it's an important issue to address. So, I'm addressing it.

You're not addressing it, you're just making reassuring noises. Addressing it would involve explaining why Facebook actually bought Parse and how it fits in their overall strategy. There are many reasons, both honest and dishonest, why you may not be able to explain that, but until you do, you're not addressing the issue. Which is fine by me - I don't have any eggs in this basket - but the pedant in me needed to poin…

It's really not that hard to understand why Facebook "actually" bought Parse. Parse has a great product that developers like to use. Facebook has a platform and that requires making users and developers happy. Buying a product that makes developers happy and making it a part of Facebook's platform is a pretty straightforward strategy.

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#228

Post by conradfr »

aswanson wrote: post #176
fizzbar wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way, way too soon to declare G+ a miserable failure. It's the lynchpin to their long term strategy for maintaining their dominance and relevance in Search, which in turn is how their Golden Goose of ad revenue lays its eggs. Whether us schmuck users like or dislike it is irrelevant. At some point, G+ will be mandatory, as someone in Slate (i think, or maybe on quora somewhere) recently wrote...

Mandatory. As in a dictate under a threat, perceived or existent. How do you figure?

Well, you can no longer leave comments on the Play Store without using your G+ profile & real name (so I don't post comments).

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#229

Post by DrinkWater »

Seriously disappointed. Many (me included) will fear that a brilliant product like Parse will be abused to reheat the future outlook on Facebook.

I hope the product itself will stay as independent as possible (very unlikely).

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#230

Post by gurkendoktor »

dweekly wrote: post #152
zacaltman wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, Parse is awesome and I love it! I have the same concerns (although I already have apps using Parse in the wild!): • Will FB kill off Parse? Seems quite unlikely in the short term, but in the long term? • Are they going to try and force any integrations with FB? • Will Parse continue to improve (they've done a lot of this recently!) or will it dwindle as others move faster? • Data / Privacy - what's going t…

Totally agreed that Parse kicks ass, which is why we bought them; we're looking forward to working with the team to continue to improve it! As a brand new member of the team, I'm really keen to hear more about how we've failed at our APIs and developer support and what we could do to be way better.

Late last year, I've tried to integrate Facebook into two tiny iOS apps. It sucked, and I'm not going to touch Parse in the future.

One of the few things I needed was an app request dialog. It didn't seem possible from the SDK docs (at least not clearly so), the only way was to use the deprecated global Facebook object:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13351584/how-to-send-user...

There was no definitive list of possible values for the dialog name or parameters either. Apparently "message" was being ignored, but only for "feed" dialogs...? Apparently there is a replacement now, but it's still in beta. How am I supposed to tell my clients what is possible (and sustainable) and what isn't?

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