This raises the larger question about how much influence hackers and developers really have in terms of product adoption. There seem to be two schools of thought:
(1) Hackers/nerds are early adopters. Thus, they will influence "normal" people to use products that they judge to be superior.
(2) Hackers/nerds are a tiny proportion of the population with no real influence. They might push esoteric but superior technologies, but large-scale adoption will ultimately be driven by how quickly cat pictures can be shared with the largest group of people.
The author of the article clearly believes in (2), but Apple seems to be making money off (1). So which is it? Or is this some sort of false dichotomy to begin with?
"Or is this some sort of false dichotomy to begin with?"
Yes.
When you are starting out, you need that first critical mass of people to get your service going. Those are the nerds looking for the next 'cool' thing.
Once you have a service going, you can ditch the nerds, they are a small segment of the population. Instead pander to the lowest common denominator. I don't see how Apple is making money off (1).
I'm a nerd and I haven't owned an Apple product recently (disclosure: I had a B&W G3 in the late 90s; it was sick, I mean, firewire and usb, man).
The iPod was not the first mp3 player. (In fact, it had worse specs and a higher price than its contemporaries back in the day...)
And with their computers, I mean, realistically, they are making money off of overpriced hardware running warmed-over BSD. Sure, its got a fancy skin, but the in terms of the substantive stuff, it is BSD.
Where they really make money is incredibly amazingly great marketing and an increasingly loyal user population. You could say that the loyal group of users is due to 'superior' something or other (tech ux, etc.).
This might be true, but i can't imagine them actually winning market capital with those. Where they really win are with the commercials that I can't friggin' get out of my head.
So sure, false dichotomy, and no one ever made money off of (1), (1) is kind of the price you pay to jumpstart your market.
From the point of view of the majority of their users it's high end (but not these days overpriced) hardware that happens to have a reliable underpinning to a fantastic UI.
Sure, it's got some BSD underneath, but in terms of the substantive stuff, it's the fantastic UI the users care about.
Of course as an fvwm2 user for half a decare plus, I hate Aqua, but at least I'm aware there's a point there to be missed.
It’s flamebait because your implication is that anyone who uses it or likes it is only doing so because it is well marketed/trendy. That is insulting, for obvious reasons, to anyone who uses it because they believe it is legitimately superior.
Frankly though, your argument is just wrong, on the merits. Most BSD distributions have nothing like the set of tools and APIs that Apple ships with OS X: they don’t have interface tools rivaling interface builder (at least that I’ve seen), they don’t have the APIs for sound and images, they don’t have the APIs for speech synthesis and speech recognition, they don’t have the APIs for integration with a built-in address book, they don’t have APIs for rich typographical support, or printing, or so easily connecting interfaces with a database backend, or doing 3d transformations to portions of an interface, etc. etc. etc.
The further implication is that things like well-supported hardware that comes in predictable configurations, very good technical support for developers who run into difficulty, a large ecosystem of high quality applications and discriminating users, etc. etc. are all unimportant compared to your personal opinion of whether something is sufficiently technically innovative.
To be honest there’s really not that much in any computer system, in terms of groundbreaking ideas, that wasn’t in Doug Englebart’s “mother of all demos”, or in the Smalltalk machines at PARC. So one could argue I guess that everything done since the 70s is uninteresting and derivative. But there’s a world of difference between the ideas and a solid production implementation.
He used the usual lazy arguments and spoke of Facebook users as if they're a type.
"Facebook Messaging was built for Facebook fans. It wasn’t made for folk who are bothered about ‘privacy issues’ or the idea of oversharing"
How many hundred million users does Facebook have? It has them from all walks of life, with all sorts of opinions. Nerds and non-nerds.
From what I've seen, most people don't like Facebook. They use it because it's convenient and because other people do. They stay logged in because of the addictive nature of the status updates, so are more likely to respond quickly to messages, unlike with email.
A lot of people might use this new messaging system. It will be a bad thing if they do. Facebook has already proven numerous times that they can't be considered trusted custodians of peoples private data.
I also wouldn't like it if all my phone calls were routed through Facebook.
I don't think Apple is making a gross majority off of (1), it just happens that Apple's products can appeal to an even larger majority since they do appeal to "hackers/nerds"
I'm constantly amazed when the "hacker" types lack the ability to see the bigger picture wrt (2) you described. At least on internet comments, so many lead a very self centered viewpoint. By sheer numbers, it's clear that "hacker" types don't provide the influence that directly leads to the critical large-scale adoption that is desired by so many.
I don't think it's necessary to choose between (1) and (2) at all. "Hacker"-types and early adopters are necessary for any product to gain any traction. They hold early influence (which obviously varies depending on the product) which diminishes as the product gains a higher adoption rate.
> "Hacker"-types and early adopters are necessary for any product to gain any traction. They hold early influence (which obviously varies depending on the product) which diminishes as the product gains a higher adoption rate.
I guess then my question is whether "hackers" as an early-adopter group are worthwhile for targeting. Anyone have any anecdotes where a mainstream product started as a hacker niche?
It is almost always option 2. Unless it is a company offering cool new tech and/or directly targeted at hackers, I don't think I can think of even one large company that owes its success largely due to hacker/nerds as early adopters. Hackers tend to be extremely practical individuals, and in their pursuit to practical perfection, they often forget to realize that there are people out there who value practicality lower than many other factors (eg. aesthetics, social validation). I bet most hackers won't care much for Facebook's new release ("they just reinvented email folders -- really?"), but I'm sure the majority of Facebook's power-users will love it. Similarly, many hackers don't get the appeal of Apple's products as they believe they're sacrificing function for form, but Apple seems to be doing alright. Lots of opportunities arise when you realize that the majority of consumers out there are actually looking to gain a lot more than just practicality, even if that may come at a practical cost. Women don't wear high heels and emo teens don't wear overly tight jeans because they feel comfortable.
Oddly enough, a lot of Apple Fan boys are hackers but make the (2)-style arguments "you might not like this device but it's great for my mom who knows nothing about computers"
By and large most of those devices don't require you to hand over tons of personal (and potentially sensitive) information just to use them.
Edit: My point being that advocating on behalf of mom and dad when it comes to technology shouldn't be frowned upon if it really does make their lives easier and better.
Oh? What about the graph of everyone that you want to connect with and much of the communication between you and your "friends" (which is only boosted by these new features)?
Obviously if you want to follow your friends' activity and exchange messages with them over Facebook, you have to follow your friends' activity and exchange messages with them over Facebook. I'm not sure what the objection is here.
The point is that Facebook is based on trying to convince users to hand over as much private information as possible without making it seem like a bad thing (or even alerting them to the fact that everything they are doing is being recorded for the financial gain Facebook).
A lot of the 'lowest common denominator' people probably just see Facebook as a tool (or 'the internet'). They don't normally think about whether or not the hammer they are using is recording statistics on them from behind a two-way mirror, so why would they think the same thing of Facebook.
If a geek suggests that his parents should get an Apple computer because "It's 'just works' for my mom" it's not the same thing as Facebook because an Apple computer isn't monetized on the idea that Apple will coerce as much personal information out of your mom as is possible while trying to leave her as clueless as possible to the implications of doing so.
You don't want companies that you're a customer of to know your private information, that's fine, don't join them.
Personally I'd like it if my bank knows my name when they initiate a call to me.
You might like a bank that acts like this:
"Hello Customer with ID 31059283, your bank account balance is negative five dollars and is overdrawn. The last transaction was an eftpos transaction for $5 at a fast food restaurant. We are unable to tell you any other transactions prior to your account being overdrawn because as a matter of privacy policy we only store the last piece of transaction data. "
Well, I don't. Companies that don't know anything about me don't have my business, they just can't compete, like the Ford Model T.
> You don't want companies that you're a customer of
> to know your private information, that's fine, don't join them.
The issue is trying to protect people from themselves. By protecting them from themselves, you are also protecting yourself. I posit that the vast majority of Facebook users fall into the following categories:
1) They joined to use Facebook as a social networking tool, and they are so used to a multitude of things on the internet being free, that they never bothered to question how Facebook is monetized. They personally don't derive any value from their personal, private information, so they don't have any inkling that Facebook could have any interest in that information.
2) They joined Facebook, and they know that Facebook has their private information, but they don't care. Their attitude is: "What's the worst that could happen?" They will only be convinced that something bad could come out of Facebook's data mining of their information when either: 1) something happens to them or 2) something happens to someone else and is high-profile enough for them to believe that it happen (while not being obscure or enough for them to think, "Well, they deserved it.)
3) They don't necessarily want to be on Facebook, but all (or most) of their friends are and they miss out on things like invitations to events, as well as 'inside' discussions if they aren't on Facebook. They attempt to try and limit the private information that they put onto Facebook, and to limit who can see the information they do put on Facebook, but sometimes they get lost in the maze of config options for privacy settings that are hidden here and there (scattered about, rather than gathered into one place).
Facebook is used by several hundred million people. It looks as though their old messaging systems will just be replaced and extended by the new one. I don’t think they need to worry all that much about early adopters. If the average Facebook user likes the new messaging system it will be used. What nerds do doesn’t matter.
I'm the author of the piece and I believe in both. 1 works initially but then 2 takes over in time. Apple isn't about "hackers", it's about people who want ease of use and style. Linux boxes and the like are hacker territory with hardware they can mess with.
I was just talking to my wife yesterday about this concept of "not for nerds, but rather for teens" when I was describing an iPhone app I'm working on. The app as it is now works exactly the way I want it to work, then I realized that I may not be the demo I should be targeting.
At this point, my options are to redesign and reprogram the app to appeal more to teens, or release what I have now and go for people looking for utility, then after that work on a version for people looking for fun.
I'm amazed this blog post devoid of content or insight is #1.
His 4 paragraph message boils down to: "It wasn't made for techies." The same message that has been said about the Ipad, Macbook Air, Kindle and countless others.
Spot on. Consider that IM client which got a million users in a couple of weeks a short while ago... that's the market that FB Messaging has to be aiming at, surely. And with 500 million users to seed it with, they'll get to a million active users in about 10 minutes.
If it makes sense for Google to invest in Android "so that people will spend more time searching for stuff online" it sure as hell makes sense for Facebook to create a chat client so that people will spend more time using Facebook to chat.
1. Google currently get fairly guaranteed income from its search. Facebook hasn't reached that level yet.
2. Having some people online more chatting might make some other people actually want to be online less. I'm happy that no one ever pops a Facebook on me. For a number of friends, Facebook as close as I want or need to be much of the time.
Exactly. Which is why when the linked writer finishes his snarky observation with:
"Facebook Messaging is bad? No. It just isn’t built for you."
I pause for a moment.
I think it's equally lucid to think "but I don't want to step onto your lawn!" as it is to denigrate the "get off my lawn" mentality.
The privacy implications wavered by others, if not frivolously, then for other reasons, are still of concern to me. Regardless of whether or not I'm happy to waiver them myself.
it will ultimately cause users to spend more time on site when they can send sms or email very easily through FB. for instance, i neglect to use FB chat a lot because i'm not sure if the user is really logged in - if it instantly became an email or SMS so i know it would reach the recipient, i would use it more
Great point on this article. FB is starting to remind me of AOL. AOL users didn't care that you could run IE outside of AOL WWW or that you could use Thunderbird instead of AOL mail. Just make it simple and keep it simple. Good job.
Does that mean Facebook will vanish completely over the next 10 years and turn into a punchline? Simplicity comes in different forms; I suspect that FB is actually aiming for the wrong kind in this case.
I was writing about this last week here on HN; but decided to kill the comment as I felt maybe I was being too pessimistic/critical:
I stated that FB has the Toys R Us business model: People are always producing kids; the internet always has new generations coming online. They are building for the COMING generations -- not the current.
Another here on HN summed it up best: FB's new messaging platform is for those who think FB IS the internet.
Additionally, this is further reason why I would not want/use a FB payment system. I dont want to have to be logged into FB / have an account on FB in order to pay something.
We have all seen how maverick Zuck is with others' privacy...
Disclaimer: I have never, nor shall I ever, had a FB account. I refuse to participate. While I see the value it provides others - I have been perfectly happy to not have had an account - and even gone as far as asking friends and girlfriends not to post pics or any other info about me to the site.
This is the internet. Facebook will be lucky if it survives past the current generation, much less generations. It was only a few years ago that myspace was all the rage. Its not my intent to bash Facebook, but things change so fast in ways not many can predict.
The internet is also relatively young. Is it not unreasonable that the pace of change might stabilize over time, and a few long-term players will emerge?
What I'm saying is -- I don't think the internet itself is old enough that there enough precedent to predict how long a vastly influential internet company like Facebook might last.
It's not unusual for companies to be many decades old -- why does it seem assumed that an internet company that is fairly new today won't be around in 30 years?
I don't doubt that some internet companies will be around in 30 years. I just don't know about facebook, because they are company based on social interaction. The way we interact with each other on the internet changes often.
Right now, facebook is the rage with kids. That is fine when they are in middleschool and highschool. Honestly, I cannot fathom dragging around every friend and acquaintance I've made with me through my entire life. There's a reason why you loose touch with most of your friends after highschool.
Facebook is the rage not only for kids but for a lot of people. My friend is an ENT who works at the hospital. The running joke is the only way to get a nurse to know what you need them to do is to communicate with them on facebook.
>I just don't know about facebook, because they are company based on social interaction. The way we interact with each other on the internet changes often.
That is the problem with their new messaging platform -- they are trying to mold the way we interact so as to keep users in their walled garden.
This is a good, albeit spooky, move on their part. I wouldnt underestimate the strategery [sic] in this particular play -- especially given the assimilation of the recent goog defectors, including Maps and Wave creator....
This is not a short sighted effort on the part of FB. Sure, Zuck may have a lot of unlikeable qualities etc... but truly, he has done one thing better than any entrepreneur with the same level of skill; surround himself with really really (really rich) good advisors.
I beg to differ. MySpace had maybe 75 million users at peak. Facebook has 500 million active users right now and is growing. That's 25% of the total Internet population. And they have a smarter distribution strategy (those widgets are everywhere), making them harder to just disappear suddenly.
It's certainly within the realm of possibility, but it's not likely for a long while.
It was only a few years ago that Google search was all the rage. :)
There was a lot of turnover in search before Google. There was a lot of turnover in social sites before Facebook. So Facebook sticking around would not be unprecedented. All the failed giants of the past eventually fail, except the last one.
On top of that, I think Facebook has innovated (ok, at least iterated) more frequently and intensely on their basic offering than nearly anybody. Compare with Google, where we went from search results with ads to search results plus 3 thumbnails with ads.
Just curious, if you've never had a Facebook account how can you have an informed opinion on their product?
Personally, I can't stand Twitter, but I still have an account so I can poke about, see what's new (mostly because I have a professional interest in knowing what's going on in the world of UI development).
Using a product is not an absolute requirement for forming an informed opinion on it. There is enough literature and information out there that one can casually gather an insight into how Facebook works, what their policies are, and empirical observations about how it is used/experienced by others around oneself.
It is important to note however, that all that data gives you a very limited view of it.
I like to think I know a fair bit about cars/motor racing, but I'm positive that the few times I've spoken to actual professionals I come off as a bit of a fanboy who only knows one side of it. I can know all the physiological effects of drug abuse, but I can't know what it is like to be a drug addict without being one... etc.
I'm in the same situation re not having an account.
I work in web development and have had to integrate those disgusting 'like' buttons and examine closely the API for other jobs. All this led me to decide that Facebook is not for me.
I am very familiar with the site.. I just choose not to have an account. 98% of the people I know have accounts, and interestingly there is a group of people I know that are of the same mind as myself; have never had an account - and wont have an account. Additionally - they are all techies.
So, I follow everything that FB does - I just wont create an account.
I honestly believe that a period of stagnant growth awaits facebook in the not too distant future when a new generation will be reluctant to join as it will be that 'uncool website their parents use...to spy on them'.
>'uncool website their parents use...to spy on them'
Thank you for showing me how to prevent my kid from joining: "Here I want you to make a facebook account so I can keep track of everything you do online and make sure you dont make any weird friends. I also want to check all your wall posts to see what you and your friends are saying. Here is your password."
Teenagers don’t care whether people who will not tell their parents (i.e. the overwhelming majority of people on Earth) know that they were drunk last night, they do care whether their parents know. I think that’s actually an important distinction.
>I have never, nor shall I ever, had a FB account.
My favorite thing about this development is that now you don't have to. If you have a friend who only communicates through Facebook, or primarily through Facebook, now you get to use e-mail to talk to them, and they get to use Facebook to talk to you. Everyone's happy.
... Unless they harvest data from your messages that sit on the FB system in your friend's inbox, of course.
I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From "hey nice to meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight." That's a really cool idea.
Privacy aside, have you ever tried to look something up from a few months ago, let alone (hypothetically) 20 years ago?
This is one of my absolute dislikes with both Facebook and Twitter - you pile all your data in there, they keep it all and own it all, and make it a royal pain for you to get at it again - even just for simple things like "I wonder when I was in XYZ?" or "What was that link that Matt posted last year?".
I think it can be a pain to get at the information at facebook.com and twitter.com, but both have APIs that make it relatively easy to pull out information.
I haven’t seen a similar product for Facebook, but Tweet Nest (http://pongsocket.com/tweetnest/) is a step in the right direction for Twitter. It makes it easy to download browse, and search your tweets on your own server. Here’s an example (my own tweets): http://chasenlehara.com/tweets/ [Note: I have no affiliation with Tweet Nest, I just really like it!]
Those APIs are only superficially easy, especially in the case of Twitter — their API is purely based on a hideously broken pagination model that counts up from the present, and is cut off completely at 3200 tweets for your own account and 800 for others. It's completely impossible to access anything older than that through any means!
Nearly everyone makes the fundamental pagination mistake (Blogger being the sole exception), but calendar-based archives are a basic assumption that everybody implements. Facebook doesn't expose it in their interface but it's possible through the API. For Twitter it's completely fucked — the only people with access to your old tweets are the Library of Congress.
I imagine there are technical limitations leading to economic reasons for these kind of mistakes. So much data, sitting in so many massive silos, that they must design their systems on the basis of peoples' access patterns only hitting the most recent subset.
That, and the opposite economic reason - that you can charge for the older/richer/more complete dataset.
(EDIT: I know it's odd that I was whinging about the same thing a few posts up. I don't really know what the resolution is for that.)
I think the true reason is really just pervasive ignorance — everybody royally fucks this up and doesn't question it for a second.
If you have N items with M on each page, and the same request for 'page 2' always returns items N-M through N-2M, with the contents shuffling off the end as N increases, you're an abject failure. SELECT … LIMIT M OFFSET N-(P-1)•M is in almost every single web app and totally bullshit. It's incredibly depressing, but we'll probably be stuck with it for at least the rest of our lifetimes.
It is a truly remarkable engineering achievement that Facebook has managed to implement a less functional search feature than Google Reader, which ironically, holds the unique distinction of the least searchable system that I interact with daily. We have extended conversations on Reader, mostly related to recent papers that someone shares, and the comments are not searchable so you have to guess keywords in the title to find old threads. I assume they will fix this eventually, but it's a major usability problem at present.
I don't how great that will be. It's painful when I go back and read the emails I wrote in college, especially the ones to girls. It's the ultimate cure for hubris.
That is going to be a crazy new world. But, if nothing is private, I doubt privacy will matter all that much. Just look at stone age tribes. Not a lot of privacy there, and people don't really care.
Maybe privacy is just a construct of modernized society?
And not per se new. I imagine most people don't do it, but I (and I'm sure plenty of others here) have been logging all of my IMs, emails, etc. for at least the past 10 years.
Truth be told, it isn't that useful.
The iPhone logs all my texts. I've had an iPhone longer than I've been dating my current girlfriend (dating over 3 years now), and it's a little fun to scroll all the way back to the beginning. :)
Better the devil you know than the devil you don't. We know next to nothing about internal Google, whereas we have a fairly good idea of internal Facebook.
Reductio ad absurdum: you'd prefer to have Hitler over that kid-who-looks-like-they-might-be-a-bully down the street.
To both points: I respectfully disagree. We know very little about either, but FB has proven it cannot be trusted. Google has been pretty good so far, it's just a potential-looming-menace to Facebook's outright menace.
(1) Hackers/nerds are early adopters. Thus, they will influence "normal" people to use products that they judge to be superior.
(2) Hackers/nerds are a tiny proportion of the population with no real influence. They might push esoteric but superior technologies, but large-scale adoption will ultimately be driven by how quickly cat pictures can be shared with the largest group of people.
The author of the article clearly believes in (2), but Apple seems to be making money off (1). So which is it? Or is this some sort of false dichotomy to begin with?