Facebook threatens to delete synced photos if users don't download new photo app
theverge.com
theverge.com
This is just another example of Facebook doing whatever they please just because they can. I wonder how long that will last until people start moving away from the platform.
It's a hamfisted move. They abuse these apps to do something -- my wife tried the messenger app and discovered a noticeable loss of battery life. I think she uninstalled it within 24 hours.
Message to monetizing corporations - Sorry, all I want is a 4.5" web page downscaled from 21". It's all just CSS, right?
And this is why I signed up to the dream and bought a Mozilla device with Firefox OS; alas the hardware died around the time the OS was orphaned.
I use a handful of apps on my phone regularly and they're mainly for metropolitan services and web pages that refuse to reskin their sites for small screens. Nothing that couldn't be accomplished in HTML5 and with decent coding would probably run better than the current impls.
I think we'll need a solid alternative first. What would people want in the "next Facebook" anyway? Easy contact with every old classmate, friend, and family member? A place for their photos? An easy way to invite anyone to an event? I would wait for that day, but personally my use of FB has majorly changed over the past 10 years on it and now I get more utility out of smaller, more focused services.
I think Facebook is trying to do the Google thing and have a bunch of discrete services under their umbrella, though they don't seem to have a clue how to do that. At least they're smart enough to buy up products that their alienated users will start running to.
I can only speculate: it's because WhatsApp is giving them an always-updated social graph of a billion people right now (including inferred information on people who, like me, didn't install the application but whose numbers are in the contacts books of people who did it) and crossing this information with FB data brings more revenue than anything they can do with WhatsApp itself.
I think they're doing fine, by their metric. People are not going to abandon their services anytime soon. Me and other HN users may complain but the rest of the world doesn't care.
The features are the easy part. The thing that prevents adoption of the next Facebook is that everyone is already on Facebook.
Unlike email, you can't switch your provider or roll your own and still communicate with everyone who's still using AOL or Yahoo or whatever provider you may have used in the past. If you want to communicate with Facebook users, you have to use Facebook. And for a large number of people, Facebook was the one that got them to sign up first.
Techies and early adopters will sign up and try out a new service at the drop of a hat but your 60 year old mom or your local barber or your kid's piano teacher didn't bother with MySpace or Friendster. They only even got into social networking after years of hearing about Facebook and they are unlikely to switch to anything else and learn a new setup.
Even when Facebook changes their UI slightly, these folks are the ones who flip out and complain loudly. They're the people you'd never convince to try out a Google+ or a Diaspora.
It's as if everyone who was on AOL back in the 90's could only switch to a different email and ISP if every one of their contacts switched over as well. Since that won't happen any time soon, Facebook has staying power.
I know the only reason I still check it more than once a month is that it seems to be the only common platform everyone I know is on to some degree. I'm throwing a party? Can't send a Google group calendar invite because not everyone uses Gmail/Gcal. I'm collaborating on a project for an upcoming burn-type festival? Can't do a group Hangout because not everyone in my camp uses Gmail/Hangouts.
So I have to log into Facebook daily while these things are being planned and worked on because that's the only place I can see updates and follow along with progress. It's annoying to use and I won't install Facebook/Messenger/Memories/etc on my phone so I now I have to deal with increasingly incompatible third-party apps like Metal and Tinfoil or the increasingly broken mobile web version when I'm not at the computer.
And the reason for the hate: mostly it seems because google in their infinite I-dont-know-what decided to 1. push the hated (but understandable for technicians even at my level) common identity solution under the same name as the new social network 2. destroy reader at the same time and for apparently no good reason.
(Oh, and for those who missed it they since came back with support for using pseudonyms.)
Edit: I hope for something better, for google to create something that connects to g+ and can be self hosted, I hope for them to hold out a hand and make Facebook look bad, I hope for somethong like matrix or hubzilla or something to become common. Oh, and I already use sandstorm.io
I find it difficult to even navigate around in Google+ to get certain things done. Google Docs and stuff - same story - there's not even a sign in button that's visible when one visits the homepage(which I usually go to by typing docs.google.com). You look at some pretty pictures and blurb and then click on something and then get a new tab to open and then you may login.
The days of the Google founders counting the "weight of the homepage" (in number of words for google.com), page load speed and simplicity are long gone from other apps.
I like the Google+ posts layout and font sizes better than Facebook. IMO, Facebook looks like a decade old web application built for IE 6. But getting things done and moving around is a huge pain in Google+. The same is much easier to do in Facebook (this could also partially be because I've used Facebook for longer).
If someone in the Google+ team reads this, I'd love to rant and provide examples if you're willing to consider changes.
Going further back a year or two, I think Google Wave was going to allow self-hosting. But of course that sank with barely a trace.
It is just the only viable alternative with major commercial backing for now. Twitter could have been but they are too busy painting themselves into the corner.
Old Google at least could be crazy enough to do whatever it takes just to kick Facebook where it hurts. But I'm dreaming.
(Oh and don't underestimate how much I love it just because of all the haters that hang around here :-P)
Google+ is like Wordpress.com, it's no replacement for Facebook. The fact that is it public BY DEFAULT is a no go for me. Facebook at least allows me to configure what data can and cannot be accessed by my friends,friends of friends ... I'm also a bit sick of giving all my personal datas to Google so i'm not going to use more of their services.
Google+ allows this as well. No way I would share my family photos with the Internet.
Also, unlike Facebook, Google+ hasn't (yet) at least gone back and retroactively made private stuff public. (They did however mess upp the buzz launch pretty badly though.)
Not at all. It's the other way around actually. I think Silicon Valley, out of sheer pettiness, has betrayed the principles that were supposed to guide the WWW.
And I'd also prefer if they don't try and hijack other features.
I had installed Messenger, but had notifications turned off because I don't care to be interrupted every time someone sends me a new message when I'm not actively participating in the chat.
Today, someone tried to call me (as in voice call), via the Messenger app. Because notifications were turned off, I didn't realise they had tried to call even though I had the phone with me at the time because it's treated as a 'data' call via Messenger rather than a real phone call.
Given that I can't separate the functionality of 'text chatting' from 'phone calls' made in Messenger, I've now uninstalled it so friends can't pseudo-call me via Messenger.
That seems to be your fault for assuming otherwise. Unless there was specifically a button in the app for turning off notifications only for texts.
I do blame it that it doesn't give me the option to disable that functionality. I do not want phone calls to be routed via Messenger ever - yet you have no ability to separate that functionality.
If you use Messenger to call another Messenger user, it will attempt to make the call as a VOIP call using your data. If you don't have Messenger, it routes it as a normal phone call via your telco 'voice' 3G/4G network. Similar to how iMessage works with SMS on iphones (except with iMessage, I can turn it off on my end)
Actually I feel quite better
Turns out that I don't miss messenger at all. And I get the functionality I want (post a status, read my feed) and none of the battery and privacy sucking "options."
I use Firefox so I can just his "pretend to be a desktop browser" and respond to messages.
I have some bad news for you...
Given their claimed user base, their dominance in social networking and social-networking-as-a-platform, and this sort of behaviour ("Use our new app OR WE'LL DELETE YOUR STUFF!") they seem ripe for anti-trust action.
Of course I have google backing everything up, so maybe that's not much better. Time to write a little script to routinely backup photos from there to my own hard drive.
There's no way I'm going to install this app. I never installed the Facebook app because of repeated articles about what a battery killer it was.
I installed Google Photos on my iPhone because it provided me with some features I couldn't get otherwise.
* user hostility & just doing this with messenger app.
* messenger app exists as does instagram and whatsapp. You want your own ecosystem, build a phone or an OS
* overplaying their hand. facebook is successful because it is a defacto standard. However, fragmenting new users by expecting them to have 4 apps (whatsapp, instagram, messenger & moments) as well as a website is a lot to ask. especially on a phone thats core function is messeging and photography, they are either launching an OS or they are insane.
Now, I use facebook occasionally out of convenience but I am not a huge fan of it. I recognize I am a fringe & atypical user concerned with privacy & tech consolidation, but threatening teenagers wasn't a great strategy when I was one not that long ago, so the alternative to "if you live under my house, you fol my rules", is to crash with your mates apple, microsoft, google, twitter, snapchat and whatever else exists
they tried that and it was a dismal failure.
The article is thin on details, does this mean it deletes photos out of your Google Photos and Apple Camera Roll apps? It seems to be written a bit FUDdy, but it is Facebook afterall, they're known to violate the social contract they have with users frequently.
Most users have no reason whatsoever to worry.
Everyone on HN knows not to trust Facebook with anything of of value, but as technical people our collective response to a corporation deleting the stuff of people who don't should not be "I'm okay, I have backups".
They'll have a great opportunity to learn via experience what we've known for years. This is the only way they learn.