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Facebook buys Parse

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Re: Facebook buys Parse

#261

Post by fizzbar »

rahoulb wrote: post #208
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...

I can already feel the pressure building to start using G+, just to help with search engine results. Which makes me resent G+

Indeed. I think Youtube's "Hey, you should use your real name!" nag to be a very unsettling sign of things to come. My friends @ the Googleplex also note that there was a large schism internally wrt the whole "real name" push, but that's all heresay anyway.

I found the article I mentioned: http://www.fastcompany.com/3004448/plus-one-proof-google-plu...

The author thinks G+ will be huge by the end of 2013, which is much too short a timeline... but otherwise I think his analysis is spot-on. Some highlights:

"Sure, there’s a social networking aspect to it, but Google Plus is really Google’s version of Google. It’s the groundwork for a level of search quality difficult to fathom based on what we know today. It’s also the Borg-like hive-queen that connects all the other Google products like YouTube, Google Maps, Images, Offers, Books, and more. And Google is starting to roll these products all up into a big ball of awesome user experience by way of Google Plus, and that snowball is starting to pick up speed and mass."

("awesome user experience" is obviously highly subjective and debatable)

"What makes Google Plus different is that it is the new backbone of a company that does search better than anyone already--something Facebook could never compete with. You use Google to search, right? Well, imagine if Google knew every piece of data about you that Facebook knew. Imagine how better equipped they would be to serve you what you are looking for. Google Plus is a way of entrenching Google’s dominance in that area, not a way of stealing Facebook users. If you are in first place, that’s the time to accelerate your lead."

and the conclusion:

"I know. You are still in the “no freaking way am I joining another social network” mode. But one day soon you will wake up and find out about that one little thing and it goes something like this:

Your buddy, “Hey have you heard about this one little thing?”

You: “Oh. My. God. That’s Awesome. That’s so Awesome. How do I get that?”

Your buddy: “Oh, you need to have a Google Plus Profile or it doesn’t work.”"

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#262

Post by pifflesnort »

donohoe wrote: post #252
pifflesnort wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that make his statement more or less likely to be accurate?

More likely to be accurate. If the original statement had a nugget of truth it would be easiest to just ignore it and not answer. Instead, they are going on the record and saying its not true.

> Instead, they are going on the record and saying its not true.

It's not like "going on record" means anything; truth is an oddly malleable thing. What's true today might not be tomorrow, what is said to be true may only be what the speaker needs you to believe is true, or it may be the speaker only believes it to be true.

The best predictor of what's to come is past experience and objective observation, not the words of people who have both incentive and ego wrapped up in propagating a particular narrative.

[edit] From another comment, here's an e-mail from the Parse team, from 1/15/2013 -- only 3 months ago:

"Being acquired isn't part of our game plan for now. We want to build a viable business that people can use and enjoy. We have 50k apps built on our infrastructure and a huge customer base that is growing rapidly. Everyday we have more and more Basic, Pro, and Enterprise users paying us for our awesome services."

https://gist.github.com/brianpattison/5463282

When you're dealing with venture capitalists, the truth is whatever they need the audience to believe.

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#263

Post by axusgrad »

voidlogic wrote: post #248
jacquesm wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If google keeps ramming their social network product down peoples throats it won't be very long before they have more than just a social networking problem.

As a user my G+ experience is so far superior to my Facebook one that I laugh every time I read something like this. I check my G+ every day because my streams are interesting and I enjoy it; I check my FB everyday because my entire extended family, pre-school friends and their dogs have accounts there. People are crazy to think that Google should not just have one account that spans all their services, it makes busi…

Perhaps enjoying the use of it, and having everyone and their dog on it, are mutually exclusive? Some kind of extra variable in Metcalfe's law :P

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#264

Post by freshfunk »

cletus wrote: post #12

This doesn't surprise me in that it seems like a natural fit for Facebook, who has a Mobile Problem [tm]. As much as people fear Facebook becoming The Internet (in the AOL sense), Facebook is actually really late to this party. Apple has a mobile OS, a content and payments ecosystem and a deeply integrated set of products. Google has a mobile OS, GMail, a search engine, a burgeoning content ecosystem and its Maps/loc…

Facebook is a one trick pony as much as Google is a one trick pony (search).

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#266

Post by mingfli »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #230
dweekly wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

The replacement is FBWebDialogs, and it's not beta.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/howtos/send-requests-us...

The definitive list of properties for the request dialog is documented here https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/reque...

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#267

Post by jacquesm »

psbp wrote: post #260
jacquesm wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use facebook either. So G+ is far inferior because at least I can get facebook out of my life.

Do you just not like the name? As voidlogic points out, it's basically a generic account for Google services. There's a potential to engage socially, but you don't have to.

I'm pretty hard to fool.

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#268

Post by saraid216 »

jacquesm wrote: post #267
psbp wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you just not like the name? As voidlogic points out, it's basically a generic account for Google services. There's a potential to engage socially, but you don't have to.

I'm pretty hard to fool.

No, you're just hard to please. There's a difference.

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#269

Post by [deleted] »

styrmis wrote: post #225
jamesaguilar wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 _usefu…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook buys Parse

#270

Post by theDaveB »

Just started using Parse for a clients app am developing. It is a social network type app!

I wanted to actually use Facebook as the backend but the client didn't as they thought it would force people to use Facebook.

Dave

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