Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
raysun.blogspot.com
raysun.blogspot.com
Joel seems to wrongly assume that the preference is defined by the person alone. Whereas more often than not, the medium is defined by the nature of the message and the sender _is_ the best judge. - It is an opaque abstraction to not let me choose the medium to deliver in.
You're saying it as if it's a bad thing.
Email is asynchronous. IM and SMS are disruptive.
And on IM versus SMS, the sender of a SMS usually doesn't know if the recipient received the message, while the default behavior of IM is to notify your contacts list if you're online.
These are different mediums people use for different kinds of communication / contacts.
But I don't expect Facebook to get this, especially considering their total disregard of the way people interact with one another. It's a wonder they are number #1, but I guess the alternatives sucked a lot more.
But yes - different methods of communication have different semantics, as Marshal McLuhan never said. But it is nice to group them, and to be able to seamlessly transfer between them. No doubt I'd love Google Chat's "This person is now offline. Click here to send a SMS" if they had any support for anywhere but the States. And I look forward to the Sense UI concept of crossing the streams coming to stock Android so I can use it myself.
It depends on the carrier and on the sender ... most people don't get delivery reports back.
> Email, by contrast, hasn't got any reports that any decent human being would use
Yes it has, you can embed tracking pixels in it. Not really reliable though.
Wait a minute, is that true? Do you pay for receiving text messages in the US? That does seem a little crazy from a European perspective.
Clearly no-one in the US gets any text message spam, or they'd be _really_ angry about paying to receive that.
Also, it's funny that Apple is being brought up in this context. The iPhone treats SMS messages just like chat messages (using the iChat UI), which is exactly the "problem" being described in the article of mixing messaging types carelessly.
If you are a heavy texter, there are much better plans on other carriers. For instance, Virgin Mobile has unlimited text and data and 300 minutes for $25 a month.
[Edited to clarify which part of the parent I was responding to]
When I signed an agreement in college, I texted so infrequently that I saved money by paying for individual messages. Now that I can afford it, I still pay per message as an excuse - I can ask people to call or email without sounding rude.
Before that, I used to use Foxmail, then Thunderbird and then Evolution and none of them have been as good as Apple Mail
Its my favorite email client by far because of its simplicity in function and UI. I get some extended functionality from indev's products, in particular Mail Act-On for quickly sorting mail and Mail Tags. I'd love to see it with slightly tighter calendar integration but otherwise I love it.
Both companies to a large degree embody their founders and because of that take wildly different courses of action.
Jobs at Facebook would be a disaster because the company has not been setup in a Jobs-friendly manner.
Both companies are also wildly successful because they avoid design by committee. Facebook is about sharing your information with everyone, it's not the place for privacy nuts. Apple is about delivering the best computing experience possible, it's not the place for tinkerers.
Jobs heading Facebook would be a platypus, it just doesn't make sense. Jobs has been on a roll for a while, maybe Messaging is Zuckerberg's Newton. Maybe it isn't. Calling it on the first day is something I would not do.
My first reaction when I read about this new Facebook component was that it would be hard to use without being annoying. The medium of communication matters. For example, you might be forgiven for using txt-speak in an SMS, but when I get an email written like that, it gives me a negative impression of the sender.
I'm also trying to get my head around what problem this is actually trying to solve. It is much the sort of "meta problem" that programmers like to solve. The devil is in the details though, and usually those fall through the cracks. Witness all the mostly awful attempts at "write once run anywhere" desktop GUI implementations.
Just looking at this long term, one can see that facebook will likely try to push their interface as a standard communications interface to everyone that you want to reach (business or otherwise) and ultimately let users choose how they can be contacted. This has far reaching implications for a product trying to reach their customers. Maybe they will even break this out into a paid product for businesses to reach their customers, who knows. Theres alot that can be done with a system like this. And im surprised it took so long for someone to do it. I believe the market has been begging for something like this for a while.
Full stop. While the messaging landscape is definitely changing, the notion that the subject field is now obsolete seems extremely premature, to say the least.
On the one hand, the idea of mixing all these messaging formats together sounds like it might be a confusing mess -- a Google Wave-level UI disaster. As he points out, these media have very different usage patterns that may not turn out to mesh that well.
On the other hand, saying "Facebook should just do a beautiful, elegant implementation of what everybody else has already done" is a very low-risk strategy. It doesn't innovate or solve any new problems. As a strategy for an industry-defining company, this is a route to irrelevance.
So is it better for Facebook to risk failure, or risk being boring? I have to say they've recovered well from failure in the past (Beacon, early mis-steps with news feeds), so my vote would be for the gutsy, risky, change-the-game strategy.
The problem here is that they're creating a wildly complex solution to a non-problem. It's not a question about being boring -- it's already boring because only software engineers care about unifying people's inboxes.
And although it may not seem so today - launching a glass-fronted phone with a single button, was seen by many to be completely nuts.
Touch-screen phones in almost the same configuration as the iPhone existed years before it's release. There was really nothing nuts about making improvements to that design. Even if there was no guarantee that the iPhone would be wildly successful, it was certainly not going to be a total failure.
The concept of a mobile web browser or a touch screen phone wasn't new -- everyone had already done that. Apple just did it better. Multi-touch is most unique feature of the original iPhone, but that was hardly a risky move.
I guess entering a new market with a higher priced product and many established competitors doesn't count as risky if the product is really good? That's hardly a failing.
I guess when man first used fire to cook, you might argue that eating something warm wasn't a new concept. After all, some animals had eaten fresh kill or each others droppings before they cooled off.
The idea of Apple having retail stores wasn't a new concept. Risk there?
http://www.pcworld.com/article/115507/gateway_to_close_all_r...
Apple was very careful entering the new phone market -- they heavily leveraged their existing iPod market and technology.
However, if you go back far enough Apple was one of the pioneers of touch screen portable computers with the Newton. Apple invented the term PDA. In terms of invention, that was something very different. They got a long of things wrong with that device that was corrected by competitors doing it much simpler.
I'm not saying that Apple doesn't take risks -- your other post was filled with good examples. It's just that their most successful products tend to be low-risk slow-burn affairs.
After the 9/11 attacks, Apple was still working hard on development while others cut back. Many thought Apple was crazy to build fancy retail stores at very costly locations. Many said that targeting the high-end of the market was doomed to fail in a weak economy, but Apple kept expanding.
Maybe the choices Apple has made just don't seem so risky after seeing them being so wildly successful? The Gateway stores are long gone. I haven't seen details of the revenue per square foot at Microsoft stores.
Besides, MySpace also had a huge network effect, and lost to Facebook.
But just as people for quite some time accepted the shortcomings of mySpace until a better alternative came along, people will (and already do) accept the shortcomings of FaceBook because of it's size.
In other words. FB's introduction of various features and products work because they are big and because of the networks effects.
Case in point "Like"
"Like" is not by any metrics new or unique. It's just much more powerful when a company like FB introduces it because of their size. That goes with many other things they have introduced.
Fmail is just a freaking communication tool.
It's not solving anything new. It's taking advantage of it's ecosystem to provide something useful and unique, because of size of the network not because of the actual solution.
And that is fine. Good for FaceBook.
But let's not confuse what is a product of network effect and size with innovative thinking.
I disagree that. Google have made some usable softwares. Before Gmail came, webmail was a mess. I guess people remember those popups and irritating ads from Yahoomail, hotmail etc.
Both articles essentially state that the company (Apple/Facebook) should not try to innovate, because their implementation will suck and then go on to mention problems that are rather trivial and will not actually be problems.
Sorry, but I think Facebook is good enough at product design that they can pull this off. Facebook doesn't need Steve Jobs; Zuckerberg is pretty bad ass at making products people like and use extensively. If you need evidence you should look at Facebook, a lot of people REALLY like that service.
That said, first and foremost, Facebook is a contact management app. Allowing people externally to send messages to a FB account is the next step in managing contacts. The UI enhancements are unimportant in comparison.
Uhh, if you base your SMS arguments from the U.S. outlook alone, you have clearly missed the point. The rest of the world has adapted to SMS much better than the U.S (well, the stupid charges here are to blame) and facebook clearly has a global outlook.
Abstracting the communication medium is actually solving a pain - because you, the receiver, have decided where you will be available. So, if you decide not to get a text, you can do that.
Having said all that, I find the whole thing creepy for now facebook will know not only who you are friends with, who your family is, and who your ex is, but also where you were last night; but, the zinger is facebook can now gauge your social signals in real time. That's a scary thought!
This is very true, I don't know if it is common knowledge inside the US but the rest of the world doesn't generally pay to recieve messages.
You can get unlimited internet on your phone for an extra fiver, or tenner a month.
It's foolproof!
The author basically thinks he is smarter than the guys who founded facebook, and that they should do something he believes Steve Jobs would have done had he been with facebook?
Supermarkets carrying things other than groceries (e.g. lightbulbs) didn't necessarily solve a user problem (i.e. people just went to the hardware store for light bulbs), but that decision was still a win for supermarkets.