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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

They killed it because it didn’t work on mobile.

Then they lacked the imagination. The Facebook app would have become a web browser where Facebook controls user auth, contacts and then payments. Big $$$

By 2009, Apple and Amazon already had more credit cards on file than any other company in the US if not the world. In Apple’s case because of iTunes, before the App Store and Amazon because Amazon. Why would you use FB for payments when you were probably either shopping on Amazon, Apple or EBay using PayPal?

In this path, people would be interacting with games/content in Facebook "apps" that are effectively mobile web pages. Facebook would have control inside their garden.

As soon as any Facebook app convinced a user to pay, all other facebook apps would have a seamless checkout.

Getting user financials isn't easy but we've seen the rise of Venmo, Robinhood, and Neobanks since then so it's doable.

By 2009, mobile was clearly the future. But the phones were underpowered and didn’t run web pages well. Even today, most of the world is browsing the internet on low end phones where the web provides a sub par experience.

Desktop penetration is lower outside of the US. Aren’t Internet cafes still a thing in much of the world because people don’t have computers at home?

I think internet cafe's are pretty old school everywhere now. Anecdotally, much of the developing world leapfrogged the US on mobile/fintech. People had low end smart phones and banked with their phone carriers 5+ years ago in East Africa.

Latest anecdote (this week) is not seeing internet cafe's in Belize and government PSA's say to contact them on whatsapp.

That said, Facebook makes their money in rich countries.

I’m an ignorant American, you mean what I see on 90 Day Fiancé is not representative of the rest of the world?

In 2009 neither Apple nor Amazon allowed P2P payments.

Peer to peer payments is still not a big deal compared to consumer to business spending. Even if you consider eBay to be P2P, it still mostly went through PayPal.

>would have become a web browser

Not on iOS where that sort of thing is prohibited. Sure they could put a skin over safari, but apple would have banned the entire FB app as soon as they found a developer's app they didn't like.

I always wondered: why is Apple allowing WeChat to exist? Their mini apps seem in direct competition with the app store. Is this a China political thing? Are they worried about losing all access to the market there? It seems clear Apple is not applying their own rules consistently. If that's the case, wouldn't there also be anti-trust implications here?

> Is this a China political thing?

Yes.

I can bet if Apple banned WeChat, most people in China would switch to Android. Apple doesn't apply the same privacy rule in all countries as well. It's all about business, never about consistency.

But apple can pull the plug on it, right? It would hurt business of course, but it's probably a good position to have that hypothetical power.

Apple would have lost the mainstream user back then. Now they have power over facebook

That’s the same thing Adobe thought when Flash wouldn’t work in the iPhone.

Different audience. People went on the internet for the first time for facebook. A lot of people never leave the facebook ecosystem. Having a phone that didn't have facebook would make it less popular.

A phone not supporting flash might get developers upset. But by that time developers wanted html5 to take over and developer preference doesn't push product.

One can make the case that the most inexperienced with computers person is Apple's ideal customer / most profitable. Not being able to get on facebook would push this demographic to other phones.

Wasn’t FarmVille and applications like them Flash based?

You also have to remember even as late as 2011, Motorola was trying to sell the Xoom tablet as being able to browse “the real internet” because it (belatedly) supported Flash.

But then we still get back to the fact that in 2008, the iPhone 3G had 128MB RAM and couldn’t even fully load a regular web page. When you scrolled to fast, there was a checkerboard while it tried to render the rest of the page. It definitely couldn’t do any complex animation within Safari.

Maybe their desktop traffic wouldn't have tanked so much if they'd kept it a richer experience, and continue to enrich it. Instead they abandoned it completely once traffic patterns tipped towards mobile.

How many people really use desktops that much in 2021 for personal use? Facebook is already seen as being “for old people”.

78% of homes have a computer in them. [0] I don't know anyone who does not use a PC for personal use, and my non-work social circles are not at all techie dominated.

Also I'm not talking about 2021: I'm talking about years ago when Facebook moved away from prioritizing the PC platform. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered, I don't know, but when FB became a primary entry point to the internet for many people, and FB then mostly ignored desktop experience, it certainly accelerated any decline already in place. But had they enriched that experience, maybe there'd still be a much stronger following there.

[0]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/computer...

55% of all web traffic worldwide comes from mobile.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-...

And considering that most people spend 8 hours a day at work, how much personal usage on the web comes from the desktop? How many younger people are using computers for personal use - especially if it a shared family computer.

Heck I am a software developer and my personal computer is just sitting in a corner as a Plex server. I haven’t used it for anything productive in a year and a half and that was for updating my resume.

Besides that, Facebook got more popular because of mobile when everyone had a camera in their pocket with GPS when they csn post the highlights of their life. Not to mention WhatsApp is all about communicating real time and Instagram is about sharing pictures.

So you do no personal development on a desktop? Do you use your work's equipment? Are you using your phone?

I have three desktops on the go all day. Three keyboards in front of me and three mice. I run Windows 7, 10 and ubuntu and another ubuntu under windows 10. Trading that in for my mobile is very limiting.

I develop to trade labor for money. The last thing I want to do when I get off work is more computer work.

If I’m just doing a hobby project proof of concept to learn a new for me technology, I would do that on my work computer. We have a very liberal open source process where we can open source a project under:

https://github.com/aws-samples

That only requires going through a simple process. That also means I have unlimited admin access to multiple dev AWS accounts using our internal tool that we can’t name but almost everyone knows about.

If/when I leave, I can just fork it and continue to work on it if no one else is interested in maintaining it. Otherwise, submit a pull request.

Any outside work I would do would be considered “consulting” - the same thing I do on my $DayJob. That would clearly be a conflict of interest.

I can imagine working at Amazon taking away your desire to do anything outside of work. Did you feel the same way before Amazon?

I’ve felt the same way for 25 years. I haven’t programmed as a hobbyist since graduating from college in 1996.

BTW, I would never want to be an SDE at Amazon. I don’t do on call. I work in consulting. We are told that we are “in charge of our own calendar”. Meaning that if we are putting in more than 40 hours regularly, we aren’t managing our projects correctly.

On a day to day basis, my actual manager only has a high level idea of what I’m working on. We as consultants guide our project implementations.

Yeah same here. I have big screens around me everywhere. Why poke at a tiny 6.5" even I have 24" 4K glory and support efficient keyboard input?

Worldwide contains a lot of places without personal computer friendly economics. The corresponding stat in the USA is about 47% by way of comparison.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/683082/share-of-website-...

Anecdata, but I'm teaching a coding class for 10-12 year olds and most of them don't know their way around a laptop. Most of their work has been done on tablets or maybe phones.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that huge chunks of demographics don't really use desktops or laptops all that much.

Doesn't that make them really inefficient? I couldn't imagine efficiently coding on a phone or even tablet without adding a keyboard, mouse and larger screen (eg Samsung DeX) which will basically make it a laptop or desktop.

I think he meant before entering his class they didn’t know their way around a computer.

You're correct. Apologies for writing that could be misinterpreted.

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