As seen with Google, just having excellent engineers and revenue are insufficient to building lasting products, much less fulfilling an aggressive long-term mission.
Novi is the team at facebook that works on Diem and the novi wallet.
Agree with your point - to a limit. Some of facebook experiements flopped but not all. Also, unlike Google, fb mostly marketed them as experiements.
Replying mostly for sharing purposes since not all of these products' histories are common knowledge. Not to one-up anyone...
> Libra Government Blocking. Seemed interesting, especially in a crypto world. Unclear if world needs more crypto projects. Some economists suggested the "basket of currency" approach at scale would just be an arbitrage opportunity for someone to drain the bank-of-facebook. I'm guessing this project existed partially as a vanity project or honeypot for hiring.
> Portal? Still sold, still developed (uses alexa and amzn develops alexa-for-portal work still), still used. IMO it was good tech no one trusted (understandably).
> Or Building 8 in general IIRC they have build a few internal products for fb and probably a lot of learning that goes into oculus/portal/etc.
> M I think this was never GA and only a test trial? Would've been cool but again, because fb it couldn't be trusted.
> Parse? Open sourced and available, but obviously mostly unused. FB doesn't really have a b2b sales team for this sort of product so it wasn't sustainable since it was not really invest-more-effort quality. I think it was a huge missed opportunity for fb to enter the data center race against aws/gcs/azure. If fb built a benign cash cow, maybe they'd taper down their scummy social network ambitions. Or at least the value extraction. AWS cash seems to fund cool amzn loss leaders (alexa, etc). I think the same thing applies to wit.ai and other AI products they buy - if they could commercialize them into an "AWS for AI" product suite maybe they'd find a new profit center. They have world class ML work already, so seems a good place to do this.
> Wirehog I never heard of this one so i googled it [1]. Apparently it was a legal risk to continue at the time (ha!). Very similar to napster. Makes sense that a startup business (< 2 yo) would kill a controversial product. Ironic now that they seem to be above caring about legal risks.
Fair enough. Though I'd argue that with these big internet companies, the line between actual product and perpetually in beta experiment is blurred, more often by Google than others.
> IMO it was good tech no one trusted (understandably).
And as a consequence, the adoption of Portal seems pretty negligible.
> I think it was a huge missed opportunity for fb to enter the data center race against aws/gcs/azure. If fb built a benign cash cow, maybe they'd taper down their scummy social network ambitions. Or at least the value extraction. AWS cash seems to fund cool amzn loss leaders (alexa, etc). I think the same thing applies to wit.ai and other AI products they buy - if they could commercialize them into an "AWS for AI" product suite maybe they'd find a new profit center.
Very intriguing point that provides useful thought for both a what-if (Facebook didn't kill Parse) and potential future opportunities- if only Facebook cared for them.
> Makes sense that a startup business (< 2 yo) would kill a controversial product.
Yeah, I just threw it in to get a full category range and historical range of different products killed by Facebook. I also edited in Facebook Home as well to touch upon smartphone software.
My main point is that it's all well and good for a corporate behemoth like FB to make the claim that they're getting into a new speculative field, but it's natural to be skeptical given how many of their experiments or (attempts at) products don't stick around. So as exciting as this sounds like, I give it as much credence as, say, IBM saying that Watson is going to revolutionize and transform healthcare through artificial intelligence.
It also goes in line with my cousin comment in another subthread about how Facebook's history is littered with retired replications of existing products. I didn't even mention Facebook cloud gaming (Facebook Gaming - admittedly still in progress), video streaming (Facebook Live), Clubhouse (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27580014), even HQ Trivia (Confetti). So that makes one wonder- does Zuckerberg really care about the metaverse idea, or is he just getting into it because Apple supposedly is?