Yeah, I'm sure they would be able to deploy the service, have it secure and updated, having apps up to date on their new devices. Or maybe that takes time and effort, and people need to pay their bills.
It takes much more time, effort and labor to secure high profit margins...
The profit margins need to be high enough to justify investing in the product before you know whether anyone will ever want to buy it.
The margins of successful products also need to fund all the failed attempts at making stuff that ultimately no one wants.
I think innovation without speculation is impossible and speculation has a cost.
Hindsight is 20/20. I remember when zuckerberg turned down $1B from yahoo and I couldn’t believe how stupid and greedy he must be to turn that down.
If someone offers you personally $1B, you take it, and go live the rest of your life comfortably without any worry of ever having to work a day ever again. Do you really think having $3B vs having "only" $1B matters in the grand scheme? I surely would prefer a billion over a potential xBillion. There is more to life than working your ass off. Zuckerberg wanted power, not more money.
That's basically what Notch did with Minecraft, and frankly he seems to have been bored since. You should never underestimate how important wanting to do something interesting and worthwhile can be.
I think this was for the web version. They were mobile first for a long time, and a lot of the core team left years ago before the web version was complete.
Path has been used by my girlfriends family for the past six years as their familial social network. They all just follow each other and because they don't use it for anything else it's a perfect little community for sharing memories. It was hard for them to cope with the fact that it's all getting shut down after six years using it. Makes you wonder why smaller family or close-friends type social networks don't work…
>Makes you wonder why smaller family or close-friends type social networks don't work.
Probably because Facebook Groups covers this use case pretty well and everyone already has a Facebook account. That's my guess.
Path has been used by my girlfriends family for the past six years as their familial social network. They all just follow each other and because they don't use it for anything else it's a perfect little community for sharing memories. It was hard for them to cope with the fact that it's all getting shut down after six years using it. Makes you wonder why smaller family or close-friends type social networks don't work…
Ad-based, VC funded needs sprawl and people spending time looking at the app/site (and thus ads, too).
Paid can avoid that, but of course has it a lot harder to get people to sign up, so those options tend to grow very slowly, often too slowly.
That's exactly how long it stayed installed on my phone and those of my friends who I helped originally sign up for it. I don't think they ever recovered from that incident. https://www.theverge.com/2012/2/7/2782947/path-ios-app-user-... I can't believe they somehow trotted along for another six years. Never seen anybody use it since.
Hard to find a mobile app these days that doesn't demand contact access, try using WhatsApp without providing it and it's a rough ride, I'm super reluctant to upload mine but that one was basically unusable without doing so. How times change.
That’s very true. Though it wasn’t the contacts upload on its own so much. It was that they were uploaded in the background without permission or notification and your contacts were spammed without your permission.
If someone offers you personally $1B, you take it, and go live the rest of your life comfortably without any worry of ever having to work a day ever again. Do you really think having $3B vs having "only" $1B matters in the grand scheme? I surely would prefer a billion over a potential xBillion. There is more to life than working your ass off. Zuckerberg wanted power, not more money.
That's basically what Notch did with Minecraft, and frankly he seems to have been bored since. You should never underestimate how important wanting to do something interesting and worthwhile can be.
I shed a tear for the bored billionaire. There is a million other fulfilling projects you could work on!
Path in its day was way ahead in ux and detail compared to other social networks. Stickers and reactions on facebook came later and even then/now never were as 'finished' compared to what Path had. A great example of how the better product doesn't always win. There are just too many factors (like timing and network effects in this case).
With social the product is always the network. If nobody uses it, the product is not better at all. It just has some nice features that would be good if a real product was there (the people). I know it seems pedantic, but you cannot grow a social network with just a platform, despite how amazing it is. This fails time and time and time again. You need a story that sets it apart from existing stuff that brings in peop…
Sure, but FB had a smaller network than Myspace. Instagram once had a smaller network than Flickr. They grew the network through better UX (ok it's hard to say now with their MS-Word style shotgun blast of icons, but FB was once miles ahead of MySpace).
With social the product is always the network. If nobody uses it, the product is not better at all. It just has some nice features that would be good if a real product was there (the people). I know it seems pedantic, but you cannot grow a social network with just a platform, despite how amazing it is. This fails time and time and time again. You need a story that sets it apart from existing stuff that brings in peop…
Sure, but FB had a smaller network than Myspace. Instagram once had a smaller network than Flickr. They grew the network through better UX (ok it's hard to say now with their MS-Word style shotgun blast of icons, but FB was once miles ahead of MySpace).
No, FB initially grew because of exclusivity of the network. I only signed up because it was for college people only at the time. I didn't care about the interface at all, just the content and who was posting that content. It was absolutely not "myspace with an improved interface".
Path was very popular in Indonesia when I visited a few years ago. I guess people just switched to other social networks like Instagram. I wonder whether people will have moved on from Instagram in 10 years.
I heavily believe social networks will always be cyclical, as people always want excitement. A new social network launches, everyone gets excited for something new and different, it grows to the point where your grandma and your teachers or kids are on it too, you lose the excitement and start looking for the next "entertainment". The world is moving faster than ever with entertainment and attention spans. Facebook i…
Social Media has seen ascendancy because it taps into a primal need of humans for connection and approval. Up to now, that's come with a price as the business needs of companies providing platforms have come first, leading people to think quantity of connections is desirable and to be endlessly pulled in with feeds and other media that aren't "connecting" at all, but stave off feelings in general. Perhaps we're coming closer to a crossroads where meaningful connections and actual communication will override the Facebook/Instagram model of dopamine triggers and passive connections.