What Facebook Should Steal From Microsoft’s Playbook | Hacker News Reader

What Facebook Should Steal From Microsoft’s Playbook

techcrunch.com

13 pointsedw5199 comments

Word, Excel, Powerpoint were applications which could be used by business to benefit the bottom line through increased productivity. Scrabulous in particular and Facebook in general tend to have exactly the opposite effect.

Instead of following Microsoft, Facebook is quite logically following the Google model - collect data on hundreds of millions of individuals and then sell that data.

This is a terrible article in my opinion. He says the app eco system on facebook is not thriving. Is there any data behind this statement? Has facebook seen a drop off in facebook games or facebook game activity?

He talks about news feeds and gaming activity in there - fb explicity moved away from this because everyone was complaining about fb games in news feeds, but I think that people are playing the games?

In local supermarkets here in the UK, they are selling fb gift cards, specifically branded by game, so things must be going ok?

This article is mere speculation

"This article is mere speculation"...."so things must be going ok?"

"This is a terrible article in my opinion"..."Has facebook seen a drop off in facebook games or facebook game activity?"

I must make absolute statement. I must also follow up with wishy-washiness.

I was saying that the article did not answer the question if there was a drop off in facebook games and facebook game activity. I assume that only fb can answer these questions.

I put them out there in case anyone did know the answers. The fact I've seen facebook gift cards in stores with Mafia Wars branding seems to me that there a fair few people still playing these games.

"Instead, Facebook is increasingly looking like Yahoo!—it does everything from Photos and Chat to Email and Places. It provides just enough features to be functional but leaves much to be desired, and increasingly depends on advertising as the revenue model."

I could not agree more. I guess(just a guess) that for more than 350 million people (facebook minus myspace users) it will always be the first social network but its luck of modularity, its reluctance to protect its users privacy in a user-friendly manner will be the first things to make it eventually irrelevant.

Techcrunch definitely never lets an opportunity slip to slag on Yahoo!. The irony of this critique coming from an AOL-owned blog dependent on advertising revenue is kind of cute.

The Microsoft versus Facebook comparison is not apt.

Facebook takes something like a 50% cut of the money made by Zynga with their Facebook app.

Microsoft did not create a walled garden so did not have the opportunity to charge for running on their platform.

Software as a service and (to a lesser extent) the various app stores are different. The incentives are not the same.

Facebook takes a 30% cut of Facebook Credits transactions. I believe that Zynga has negotiated that cut to be slightly smaller.

Looks like everyone (and their dog) knows what facebook should do, except facebook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com