Facebook Tries Again on a Smartphone • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Tries Again on a Smartphone

#21

Post by signalsignal » Sun, May 27, 2012, 9:51 PM UTC

jiggy2011 wrote: post #14

I know a fair number of people who bought smartphones for the specific purpose of using facebook on the move. Even for those who didn't it's often a big use case. I wonder if facebook could release it's own phone (linked to a FB account) and then restrict access of other smartphones to it's platforms and APIs (so that they become a crippled shell) while adding features that were exclusive to the FB phone. Could domin…

Sorry, but even Apple, who develops its own operating system, didn't develop it own system from scratch(1). The iOS platform is an adaption of this as well, meaning it is not a unique system.

One of the challenges of creating a startup is building a business which not only provides solutions/products to customers, but also works with other businesses. Attempting to cripple competitors platforms will quickly and easily be interpreted as monopolistic behavior(2).

1) Originally Mach 3 to Xnu and GNU and *BSD system utilities with only a proprietary layer on top, Quartz.

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

Re: Facebook Tries Again on a Smartphone

#22

Post by jiggy2011 » Sun, May 27, 2012, 9:59 PM UTC

signalsignal wrote: post #21

jiggy2011 wrote: post #14

I know a fair number of people who bought smartphones for the specific purpose of using facebook on the move. Even for those who didn't it's often a big use case. I wonder if facebook could release it's own phone (linked to a FB account) and then restrict access of other smartphones to it's platforms and APIs (so that they become a crippled shell) while adding features that were exclusive to the FB phone. Could domin…

Sorry, but even Apple, who develops its own operating system, didn't develop it own system from scratch(1). The iOS platform is an adaption of this as well, meaning it is not a unique system. One of the challenges of creating a startup is building a business which not only provides solutions/products to customers, but also works with other businesses. Attempting to cripple competitors platforms will quickly and easil…

Facebook has enough scale now to mean that other companies have to work around them rather than the other way around.

Whether they develop their own system from scratch or not is largely irrelevant , especially if they use BSD licensed code.

You would really be relying on a court finding them to be a monopoly which might be difficult to do if it was implemented in a subtle enough way.

Re: Facebook Tries Again on a Smartphone

#23

Post by tmurray » Sun, May 27, 2012, 10:08 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #20

amartya916 wrote: post #3

" It could easily scoop up an infirm company like Research in Motion, which is valued at less than $6 billion, and drop a beautifully designed Facebook operating system on top of RIM’s phones. " I find this to be an affront to engineers and designers. It trivializes the amount of time and effort it takes to make a well engineered product. Can someone elucidate why it might be important for Facebook to have it's own h…

Their current mobile offer is... underwhelming. This is mostly due to them not being able to integrate deeply with any platform, because they don't control anything else in the stack (browser -> OS -> hardware). They seem to be looking for ways to fix this by acquiring other layers, starting from the browser -- they're in talks with Opera. This rumour about them building hardware goes in the same direction. The real…

Why couldn't they fork Android in exactly the same way Amazon has done with the Kindle Fire?

Re: Facebook Tries Again on a Smartphone

#24

Post by hyperbovine » Sun, May 27, 2012, 10:12 PM UTC

tmurray wrote: post #23

toyg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their current mobile offer is... underwhelming. This is mostly due to them not being able to integrate deeply with any platform, because they don't control anything else in the stack (browser -> OS -> hardware). They seem to be looking for ways to fix this by acquiring other layers, starting from the browser -- they're in talks with Opera. This rumour about them building hardware goes in the same direction. The real…

Why couldn't they fork Android in exactly the same way Amazon has done with the Kindle Fire?

I think that would entail them building their own hardware...

Re: Facebook Tries Again on a Smartphone

#25

Post by pemulis » Sun, May 27, 2012, 10:13 PM UTC

How do you become head tech news guy at the New York Times when you think Facebook is an operating system and that the company could "easily scoop up" RIM?

Re: Facebook Tries Again on a Smartphone

#26

Post by lnanek2 » Sun, May 27, 2012, 10:53 PM UTC

Doesn't make much sense to us techies, but maybe they'll pull some sort of business hack like amazon. Amazon ended up with the most popular Android-based tablet since they subsidized the hardware cost with their media sales and did things standard Android manufacturers wouldn't like left out cameras (which raise the cost/size/weight/power use).

Reminds me of all the talk previously about Google making a free phone service. Google and Facebook both make all their money from ads. So they might be able to do something like that, which doesn't make sense to hardware companies.

Re: Facebook Tries Again on a Smartphone

#27

Post by drumdance » Sun, May 27, 2012, 11:24 PM UTC

hyperbovine wrote: post #24

tmurray wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't they fork Android in exactly the same way Amazon has done with the Kindle Fire?

I think that would entail them building their own hardware...

Seems like an opportunity to do a deal with Amazon.

Re: Facebook Tries Again on a Smartphone

#28

Post by keeperofdakeys » Sun, May 27, 2012, 11:33 PM UTC

jiggy2011 wrote: post #14

I know a fair number of people who bought smartphones for the specific purpose of using facebook on the move. Even for those who didn't it's often a big use case. I wonder if facebook could release it's own phone (linked to a FB account) and then restrict access of other smartphones to it's platforms and APIs (so that they become a crippled shell) while adding features that were exclusive to the FB phone. Could domin…

While previously the Android facebook client was a native app, it recently became a webview (it also got slower because of this). I'm pretty sure the iOS app is also a webview now too. From the perspective of multi-mobile OS adoption, this makes sense. You now only need to develop a single webapp, and since you control the client apps, you can ensure 100% compatibility.

While I don't think they'll try to cripple other phones, they'll most likely make new features a priority for the facebook phone.

Re: Facebook Tries Again on a Smartphone

#29

Post by signalsignal » Sun, May 27, 2012, 11:42 PM UTC

jiggy2011 wrote: post #22

signalsignal wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but even Apple, who develops its own operating system, didn't develop it own system from scratch(1). The iOS platform is an adaption of this as well, meaning it is not a unique system. One of the challenges of creating a startup is building a business which not only provides solutions/products to customers, but also works with other businesses. Attempting to cripple competitors platforms will quickly and easil…

Facebook has enough scale now to mean that other companies have to work around them rather than the other way around. Whether they develop their own system from scratch or not is largely irrelevant , especially if they use BSD licensed code. You would really be relying on a court finding them to be a monopoly which might be difficult to do if it was implemented in a subtle enough way.

> ... then restrict access of other smartphones to it's platforms and APIs (so that they become a crippled shell) while adding features that were exclusive to the FB phone.

Nothing subtle about that.

Re: Facebook Tries Again on a Smartphone

#30

Post by notatoad » Mon, May 28, 2012, 12:15 AM UTC

amartya916 wrote: post #3

" It could easily scoop up an infirm company like Research in Motion, which is valued at less than $6 billion, and drop a beautifully designed Facebook operating system on top of RIM’s phones. " I find this to be an affront to engineers and designers. It trivializes the amount of time and effort it takes to make a well engineered product. Can someone elucidate why it might be important for Facebook to have it's own h…

It's about control. On my smartphone, its easy to start using google plus instead of Facebook. If I had bought a Facebook phone, they could lock it in to Facebook services so that i use Facebook as my primary social network for at least the life of my phone.

Also, it's a revenue stream. Facebook has a huge userbase but very few of their users actually pay them money. If they started selling hardware they could collect money from those users.