Apple Sucks At Social | Hacker News Reader

Apple Sucks At Social

techcrunch.com

15 pointspitdesi10 comments

Apple sucks at providing online services in general. Their strength is in making physical products and writing software for those products (at the OS level, and sometimes apps).

MobileMe was an utter fiasco, and IMO iCloud is one of the shakiest rollouts Apple has done to date. The iTunes Store does ok, but not great, either.

I'm still not entirely sure what iCloud actually is. It syncs ~/Library/Preferences? And it lets you redownload music? And I can remotely wipe my laptop I guess?

But, what is the actual service here? I switched in on in System Preferences and it didn't really tell me anything, nor did I notice anything changing.

I do only have one Mac and zero iPhones though, so maybe it would be more obvious if I had more devices?

Yes, it isn't useful if you only have one device. It is mostly a sync service. So it transparently synchronizes: - iWork documents - Contacts - Calendar - Music - Photos (the most recent 1000, I believe) - A few other things (don't recall everything)

A few things worth mentioning: - Other app data can be synchronized if those apps make use of the newer Lion/iOS 5 APIs. I don't know if anyone does that yet. - Music is “synced” by re-downloading from the iTunes Store. You can sync non-iTMS music using iTunes Match, which will upload any music it fails to match with an equivalent song in the iTunes Store. This means you do not use iCloud storage space for songs that are on iTMS.

These things are synced between iPhones, iPads, and Macs, with some support for the Apple TV (specifically, Photo Stream is also on the Apple TV).

In addition, yes, you do have find my mac and find my iPhone as part of it, and there are web apps for your calendar and contacts.

Yeah, my problem with it is that no third-party apps make use of the APIs yet. I'd like 1Password using iCloud for sync, etc. (I have multiple OSX machines, an iOS iPhone 4, and an iOS iPad 1). Right now, dropbox API is the best alternative.

Social networking (where I make the generalization within Google Plus, Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook) is saturated. I don't want to invite my friend to not-another-social-network. What is needed is refinements.

Apple being bad at social is okay with me.

Apple needs to stop trying to build it's own separate social graph for each features (Game Center, Find My Friends, Ping, maybe even Facetime) and give Zuckerberg whatever it takes to integrate with Facebook for friend discovery like everyone else is (i.e. Foursquare, Instagram).

I wish I could see what kinds of games my friends are playing, but the mental stress of thinking through who I know has an iPhone, and manually searching for them just makes it not worthwhile.

Aren't all of Apple's social graphs tied to an iTunes login? At least they are consolidating them across their own network. But, I guess since I can't FaceTime my Game Center friends, that's not very useful...

Also, yes, I don't really care if Apple does social as I wouldn't want to invest in another network either. It seems though they are trying at it and failing, rather than just ignoring it.

They didn't need Find My Friends, all they needed was a dead-simple way to send a description of the phone's current location as a text message or iMessage. Then you can just ask somebody his or her location, and if that person wants to respond it's possible with one tap of a finger.

You can already do this fairly easily—find your current location in the maps app, tap on it, and “share location”. Sharing via message is one option.

Find My Friends is more of a passive thing. e.g., there are people coming to my party, let's ask them to let me access their location so I know when I need to start panicking (not the best example, I know :p).

The list of people who didn't already know this is very, very short.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com