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The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

economist.com

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Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#181

Post by dirkgently »

ksec wrote: post #135
wybiral wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best non-yahoo similarity I can find is what Google is doing with Blogger. That's a good point. But to be fair everything "social" that Google has touched has died with the exception of YouTube. In fact Google really hasn't done a great job holding onto many other arenas than their main ones. Blogger has been blasted by Medium. Knol was outlasted by Quora. Google Code was beat by Github. Their "shopping" attemp…

The problem with Google is exactly the same as Microsoft in the 90s. They just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. What that means is, I don't mean it in a small way but in a big way. - Steve Jobs.

Yeah. Who needs big screen?

- Steve Jobs

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#182

Post by dirkgently »

sodosopa wrote: post #123
pier25 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated Their most popular property ended up being Flickr, and they let it rot when smartphones and apps started being popular 10 years ago. Instead pro users fled to 500px and other communities, and social users wen to Instagram.

Yahoo! didn't build Flickr. Flickr came from Game Neverending. It was an in-game feature and it did so well, the game was never released. That came from Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield's team and their innovative work at Ludicorp. It was purchased and then became a squandered opportunity by Yahoo!

Thanks for the history lesson. But OP never suggested that Yahoo built it.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#183

Post by Animats »

Now ads are around one-fifth of all posts that users see on Instagram, which is probably double what it was a year ago.

That's called "pulling a Myspace".

Facebook has reached the point that nothing above the fold is about my friends. Remember, sharing is spamming.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#184

Post by zerzera »

typon wrote: post #86
fabricexpert wrote: post #54

I know of a few people turning off IG and FB due to the volume of ads, when WhatsApp is monetized lots will do the same. Competitors can offer a similar experience to IG, WA and FB with less ads, because the margins are so massive for FB now, and their products are relatively easily replicated. It's VERY easy for user to switch to a competitor compared with other industries. The scale of the network is hard to achiev…

> It's VERY easy for user to switch to a competitor compared with other industries Not FOR WhatsApp it isn't. I don't know of an app that all my family/friends would switch to if WhatsApp decided to put ads on it. Switching chat apps with your entire contacts list is very cumbersome.

It took me about one hour to get my relatives to switch from WhatsApp to Signal. It literally takes a few minutes to switch. Just share the invite link and start using the other app.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#185

Post by rchaud »

geggam wrote: post #146
dkrich wrote: post #75

This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view. But can anyone recall a time that the crowd correctly predicted the ascent of an unpopular product or the descent of a popular one? I’m old enough to remember Yahoo’s rise and fall. There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool for turning down a $1 billion bid from Yahoo. Oh yeah did we forget about that? Yahoo failed because they were ou…

1998 Yahoo! turned down a 1 million dollar offer to buy Google.

Think that's bad? 10 years later, they turned down a $40bn acquisition offer from Microsoft.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#186

Post by r00fus »

dirkgently wrote: post #181
ksec wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Google is exactly the same as Microsoft in the 90s. They just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. What that means is, I don't mean it in a small way but in a big way. - Steve Jobs.

Yeah. Who needs big screen? - Steve Jobs

Are you paraphrasing? It doesn't have the same effect.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#187

Post by LiweiZ »

nolok wrote: post #81
dkrich wrote: post #75

This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view. But can anyone recall a time that the crowd correctly predicted the ascent of an unpopular product or the descent of a popular one? I’m old enough to remember Yahoo’s rise and fall. There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool for turning down a $1 billion bid from Yahoo. Oh yeah did we forget about that? Yahoo failed because they were ou…

> Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated The worst part is that Yahoo innovated a lot ... In incubators, side projects, etc ... But they failed to bring their innovations to their main products, or to turn their side things into full blown products. They had no plan, neither overall or per product. Take emails for exemple, for the longest time (and still now, although not as dominating) THE key to user identity…

Big companies seem to have industries as their unit of operation. If this is generally true, top leaders have very limited detailed input/output into a specific product itself. Many resources can not be taken into the process of a product evolution. Put it simple, top leaders of a big company usually have quite different direct goals instead of a product. A product's evolution depends on the options and resources a product team can have in a time frame. The rest of a big company is meaningless. The bigger the overlap of top leaders have with the product team, the better chance the product can evolve with the market demand. Jobs comes to my mind.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#188

Post by rchaud »

typon wrote: post #164
2sk21 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as hard you might think. Other messaging services like Telegram and Signal also use phone numbers as the identifiers so it would be relatively easy to switch.

I tried my friends to switch to Signal and it failed miserably. Their friends and family are on WhatsApp, so why would they switch? It's very annoying for people to deal with multiple chat apps for multiple groups, especially if some members of those groups are overlapping. I've personally settled with chatting with my SO on Signal and everyone else deleted Signal and moved back to WhatsApp

I had the same issue, and I believe it's tied to UI/UX.

Signal, at least on Android, looks like a stock SMS text app. That turns "normal" people off because it looks and feels different from a "messaging" app like Slack/Messenger/Whatsapp etc where doing stuff like group chats, attaching video/audio/images is easy. When people see a standard SMS text interface, they feel it's for one-to-one communication only with limited multimedia capabilities (remember MMS?).

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#189

Post by resters »

le_clochard wrote: post #156
resters wrote: post #149

It's remarkable that Sandberg is being thrown under the bus for not doing enough to stop Donald Trump from being elected. What she is (in hindsight) expected to have done is to have insisted that Facebook's news feed algorithm be used as a content filter to suppress stories promoted by politically marginalized groups. This is much the same way China's government uses its Great Firewall to control which information re…

$85,000 on Facebook ads. Surprisingly small amount, that. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/05/10/w...

Thanks for the correction.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#190

Post by jamisteven »

Im not seeing much correlation between these two companies besides industry. FB is getting bad press sure, but this is nothing like the beginning of Yahoo's downfall, which started with its cluster-F of a homepage and lack of grit or sense of cool in literally any of its products, and ended with super shit management. Yahoo made complicated the tech that needed to be simple. FB has entirely different problems, one could argue they are good problems to have and that bad press is better than no press at all.
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