361–370 of 517 posts
Just drop Fbook guys - trust me, you'll be fine without it. If someone really wants to talk to you they'll get your email or phone number through a mutual friend/family member.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did you make your friends use telegram instead just for you? I use iMessage with my best friend and my dad because it is my preferred way of communication (it is fairly secure, easy to use, and I can reply from my watch, Mac, iPad and iPhone, unlike any competitor except email). For everybody else I have to use what's app because they cannot be bothered to install an app just to contact me once a week (or some ev…
"Hey did you check out that app I asked you?" "Hey, the other day I wanted to text you and it's so much more comfortable if I can type from my laptop, would you please install it? It's just like WhatsApp, you won't even see the difference." "Hey, remember that app I told you about the other day? Turns out that the founder is this guy who cloned Facebook in Russia, and the government went after him and stole his compa…
- "Installing an app is always so complicated"
- "Why not stick with WhatsApp. It works fine for me"
"What's wrong with your phone?"
> "Hey, remember that app I told you about the other day? Turns out that the founder is this guy who cloned Facebook in Russia, and the government went after him and stole his company, how insane is that? He's now cloning WhatsApp, but better, could you please check it out?"
"What's better? And why would I trust a Russian more then WhatsApp. I don't really think it is a good idea to install it"
I haven't even made up those answers, I've heard them one way or the other. For most people, their phone just has to work and unless they mean a lot to you, they won't really bother installing it. If most of your friends are tech savvy, then your chances are good they are curious to try it out, don't mind it at all, or even support you. But most just don't care and are afraid they break things if they installed a new app.
I can even fully understand their decision. A friend of mind decided to ditch WhatsApp altogether and now I can only call her because I'm not willing to pay 15¢ just for a normal text message. She only did it because she wanted to have to deal less with social media but I don't want to. I turn off notifications for WhatsApp every now and then if I don't want to get distracted but all in all, I ust WhatsApp for 95% of all my personal text conversations.
This is kind of convenient; it gives me one more excuse not to use facebook. A few days ago I got the usual notification email that somebody had sent me a message on FB. Clicking is a low barrier so I clicked, curiously. Then I instead got the "No, now you have to install Messenger app" screen. That was enough of a barrier that I said "oh forget it, who cares, anybody who knows me would know better than to send me an…
Fortunately, vendor lock-in breeds resentment and dissidents. Hopefully, a better alternative will come from this.
It's really sad to me to see a bunch of intelligent people here being led like sheep by Facebook (no, this isn't a sheeple post, hear me out) Virtually everyone here complains "Facebook does XYZ really bad but I still use them because all my friends are there". I have a solution. Why don't you get all your friends off there? Pick a platform that you really like and start evangelising. The only reason why Facebook has…
A far better approach would be to create a tool/alternative platform that allows people to interact with Facebook and their Facebook friends, without directly using the app. It might be a bit of an arms race with Facebook if the tool is scraping the site, but there isn't a lot they can do to stop it if a lot of the users are using a Chrome extension or various other client side tools.
That means that people that come to your tool/app/page are not stuck interacting with only those other users who have left Facebook. Which of course would be terrible, except for tiny little pockets of people here and there who only interact with one another and all have the same concerns about Facebook. (maybe the OP belongs to such a group...but I've never known anyone like that)
If you were to build this, you wouldn't have the immense disadvantage of having a tiny network to begin with. Eventually, as more as more people join you, you can tweak your strategy, when you are no longer such an underdog. Obviously, such a system would have to be open source, and open to all the "alternative platforms" as well. Maybe to participate people have a choice of a paying a small subscription or viewing "nice" ads, or maybe none of the above if enough of their contributing friends approve them. Or something. Maybe it would be a WeFunder project. All options should be considered.
I'd suggest anyone thinking about this first do some reading on Game Theory, Tragedy of the Commons, etc. Don't design something that expects everyone to individually do something that is against their interest, or you WILL fail.
Previous long-time Facebook user here, but forgive my ignorance - what is Messenger? An instant message app I assume? How does this differ/improve upon the instant messaging built into every phone?
It improves on what is already built into your phone because it hooks into all of your facebook contacts, which means full names, and pictures.
So rather than fixing the problems that result in users messaging via the mobile web app instead of the messenger app, they're just going to "solve" the problem by forcing users to use the messenger app? This is why Facebook as a company doesn't have high levels of consumer trust. This will bite them in the future. Once you lose that level of trust it is extremely difficult to gain back.
I have no qualms using WhatsApp. It is a very efficient and useful app. They should probably merge messenger and WhatsApp (or maybe not lest they end up making WhatsApp bad too)
So much complaining. The web app version is crap, of course they want to move people over to the app. Why waste resources on an inferior web version when they can focus their attention on the very successful mobile app. Its just good business sense and seeing that 99.9999999999% of Facebook users already have Messenger installed, its a non issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll assume, by Chrome you mean desktop Chrome. This is irrelevant to my comment. I was specifically talking about realtime push notifications via mobile devices. Also remember that your preference is just your preference, many people would want to be able to make sure their messages get seen in realtime. And Facebook probably wants that for their users too. Again, I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm just saying…
Android Chrome supports push notifications, even when the browser is not loaded.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll assume, by Chrome you mean desktop Chrome. This is irrelevant to my comment. I was specifically talking about realtime push notifications via mobile devices. Also remember that your preference is just your preference, many people would want to be able to make sure their messages get seen in realtime. And Facebook probably wants that for their users too. Again, I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm just saying…
Chrome on Android does support real-time push notifications. I know because I was notified of a friend's Facebook post I was mentioned in within 5 seconds of my friend posting it. I don't have Facebook installed on my phone, and he posted it from his phone while my phone was face up on the table between us and we both where surprised at how fast I was notified.