Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

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Facebook does not actually do anything particularly well.

I largely agree with your sentiments about the spamminess of Facebook, but you got this very very wrong.

Facebook has astonishingly well-run engineering and design operations. What they do in terms of scalability makes Google's operations look like child's play. They are web UI design leaders, and they keep rolling out changes at an amazing pace (they push significant changes multiple times per week). The interface is cluttered yes, but it's cluttered in the same way Photoshop's UI is cluttered, that is it caters to the needs of heavy users.

It's okay and maybe even a moral obligation to hate Facebook for its time-wasting banality, but don't hate them for being good at what they do. Claiming it's all luck is like some kind of playground taunt; their operations blow the vast majority of tech companies out of the water (look at how they ran circles around Twitter). It's good discipline to recognize greatness in companies you don't like, and Facebook has a lot of important lessons for any tech startup.

I agree with you: there is a lot to dislike about facebook if you prefer to, but there is also a technological achievement there that is frustratingly difficult to deny. But I don't think they will go the way of AOL (at least not for many more years) for two major reasons: address book and photos. I know plenty of people who have two contact lists: the numbers in their phone and the people they are friends with on facebook. Sure, systems like the one Palm has let you download your contact list from facebook, but until most people are aware of that option, they will continue to use facebook as the way to keep track of people. And photos. Man, was that a killer app for that site. I personally know several friends who never wanted to sign up for facebook, but ended up having to do it so they could see their friend's wedding pictures or baby pictures or vacation pictures. And I also know friends who put their pictures on facebook and nowhere else, because they don't do back-ups or have a consistent place to store them locally and assume facebook will always have their pictures for them.

Until people can easily get contacts and pictures off of facebook and onto another accessibly sharing service in an automated fashion, they will continue to depend on it.

Fair enough. Serving completely dynamic content to 200+ million uniques is a pretty solid achievement in itself.

Though still, with the growth they've been seeing, doing anything besides throwing PhDs and scalability geeks at the problem would have been colossal foolishness (see Twitter).

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