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Facebook Slingshot – A new way to share photos and videos

sling.me

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Re: Facebook Slingshot – A new way to share photos and videos

#41

Post by loumf »

jameshart wrote: post #30

We live in the age of wonders. The internet and mobile devices create endless possibilities for people to communicate, learn and interact. And at Facebook, a company which can, if it chooses, pick from among the brightest engineering minds and focus their efforts on any problem it chooses, the power to concentrate years of programming knowledge on the capabilities afforded to us by this astonishing bounty of personal…

> And they don't even seem to have a monetization strategy for it.

Not yet, but mature messaging services seem to have reasonable monetization that isn't primarily display-ad-based. I understand "stickers" to be one of the main ones.

Re: Facebook Slingshot – A new way to share photos and videos

#42

Post by [deleted] »

jameshart wrote: post #30

We live in the age of wonders. The internet and mobile devices create endless possibilities for people to communicate, learn and interact. And at Facebook, a company which can, if it chooses, pick from among the brightest engineering minds and focus their efforts on any problem it chooses, the power to concentrate years of programming knowledge on the capabilities afforded to us by this astonishing bounty of personal…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Slingshot – A new way to share photos and videos

#44

Post by loumf »

songzme wrote: post #35

This app brings to mind an excerpt for Larry Page - The untold Story: ... Up front, an executive pitched a new product that helped users find the right offline store to do their shopping. The executive was well into his pitch when, suddenly, Page interrupted him. “No,” Page said emphatically. “We don’t do this.” The room grew quiet. “We build products that leverage technology to solve huge problems for hundreds of mi…

But, don't you think the "No, we don't do this, we build products that ...." for Zuckerberg ends with "allow hundreds of millions of people to share photos and videos". Or something like that.

Feels like there are many ways to share a photo/video and Facebook wants to make an app for each kind of way.

Re: Facebook Slingshot – A new way to share photos and videos

#45

Post by josh2600 »

debt wrote: post #38
jfasi wrote: post #26

This underscores what appears to be an interesting strategic move by Facebook: build an ecosystem of applications, which in turn encourages people to use their other products. In turn, this provides continued competition against Twitter, Tumblr, etc. The interesting thing about this app is that it's an experiment: viral success of social applications appears to be a hit or miss sort of thing, so why not throw many th…

"build an ecosystem of applications," Google tried this in the mid-oughts. They stopped and began focusing mostly on Android, Search/Ads and YouTube. They rolled all that random idea/app shit into Google X. Apparently, Steve Jobs and the Google founders sat down and he basically said focus or die. So Google focused. I'm sure there's a Google graveyard out there that highlights all the apps they attempted to make, a f…

http://www.wordstream.com/articles/retired-google-projects

For the uninitiated.

Re: Facebook Slingshot – A new way to share photos and videos

#46

Post by downandout »

jameshart wrote: post #30

We live in the age of wonders. The internet and mobile devices create endless possibilities for people to communicate, learn and interact. And at Facebook, a company which can, if it chooses, pick from among the brightest engineering minds and focus their efforts on any problem it chooses, the power to concentrate years of programming knowledge on the capabilities afforded to us by this astonishing bounty of personal…

Like others that have responded to this, I agree with you on principle. However, this kind of "innovation" is what they need to serve the simplistic minds that form the core user base of Facebook. New ways to share photos and videos are exactly what the kinds of people that use Facebook want from Facebook - nothing more, nothing less. Quite simply, Zuckerberg knows his audience.

Remember, these are people that vote for President of the United States based upon what their favorite rapper says about the candidates in 140 characters on Twitter. In that context, a new sharing app is revolutionary.

Re: Facebook Slingshot – A new way to share photos and videos

#47

Post by ed209 »

jameshart wrote: post #30

We live in the age of wonders. The internet and mobile devices create endless possibilities for people to communicate, learn and interact. And at Facebook, a company which can, if it chooses, pick from among the brightest engineering minds and focus their efforts on any problem it chooses, the power to concentrate years of programming knowledge on the capabilities afforded to us by this astonishing bounty of personal…

Did you know there are over 150 varieties of Finches? Each slightly different, maybe color difference or a larger beak or bigger wingspan. They came about by iterating on the Finches that came before.

In fact, that's how most advancements come about in nature, poetry, art, and yes, even technology. We take what came before an iterate on it.

I'm trying to think of a giant leap that came out of nowhere, but I can't.

Photos and videos are important to me. Really important. It's how I see my family 1000's of miles away or my daughter 5 miles away when I'm at work.

And just like in nature, either this iteration will thrive or die out eventually.

Re: Facebook Slingshot – A new way to share photos and videos

#49

Post by edgyswingset »

SifJar wrote: post #32
edgyswingset wrote: post #17

I don't see how this can help then monetize more. Chances are the people who are using Slingshot already use Facebook. Where does the payoff on the investment kick in?

Maintaining/increasing interaction with Facebook. Same reason as they keep improving/changing the site and their main app, and making other side apps (e.g. Messenger). The greater the level of interaction from users, the more data they can gather etc. and also the more valuable the ads they sell become. Also maybe monetization via in-app ads (although probably not; snapchat doesn't have them, and they'll be wanting t…

I guess I'm just not convinced that an app like this, which is a late clone of an insanely popular app within the target audience, will give them enough valuable data to where they can sell ads at a higher price.

Monetizing in-app with the equivalent of stickers is a possibility, but since you can already draw on the pictures I doubt that would be very effective.

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