41–50 of 288 posts
Here's my speculation: Facebook bought Parse to attempt to own mobile usage data. Draw parallels with what Google did when they bought Urchin to form Google Analytics. I don't think Facebook cares about creating developer experiences. I think they care about having tracking hooks into mobile applications.
I'm not a mobile developer, which is probably why I struggle to see what Parse does? What does Parse give me (if I was a mobile dev) that I don't get from Heroku+libs? Are push notifications and identity so painful to deal with that there's a business in creating a full platform to deal with it?
They also offer a full mobile back-end (increasingly referred to as MBaaS...admittedly not the nicest acronym): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backend_as_a_service
One of the biggest limitations is the length for which cloud code methods can run. (Nothing longer than a second, IIRC)
You can build a social sharing app, or share some data between apps, but building a "product" on it is limited to very simple cases.
Soon FB will monetize most of their APIs too. Example: Real-time access to all its social stream is going to be a paid usage API.
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…
Given the very lucrative and competitive mobile market space, we will likely to see tremendous updates in the Android platform if Google have acquired it. At least Facebook won't be biased about what mobile platform to support, it can support all other platforms without focusing on specific Android. I use Parse as my backend for my iOS apps and it is absolutely useful. They provided a great service and the mPaAS appr…
I'm not a mobile developer, which is probably why I struggle to see what Parse does? What does Parse give me (if I was a mobile dev) that I don't get from Heroku+libs? Are push notifications and identity so painful to deal with that there's a business in creating a full platform to deal with it?
But the real win with Parse is that for small to medium sized apps, you don't need to manage your own servers. Apple takes care of delivery, Parse takes care of the backend. You don't need to worry about uptime or maintaince or 2 am notifications that your server is down.
Congrats to the Parse team!! As a customer, not necessarily happy about this. I don't like Doug Purdy's quote, "We don’t intend to change this." We use Parse and love it. I really hope they maintain some autonomy as to not get sucked into the "move fast and break things" or "documentation? f--k it." Nonetheless, probably makes a lot of sense for Facebook's mobile strategy.
Our focus on quality in product and documentation got us to this point so we're not going to change that strategy anytime soon :-)
There's a huge corporate political apparatus that just paid a lot of money for the right to implant their thumb print on how you do things. You may be able to push that day forward, but unless you wind up in charge, there's not much long-term hope.
Congratulations on the acquisition, but sorry about the acquisition.