Apple's Hidden Social Network | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Hidden Social Network

matt-rickard.com

33 pointsrckrd9 comments

This is private sharing, not a social network.

Private sharing is about sending content to people A, B, and C (“push”). Think iMessage, WhatsApp, Snapchat.

Social networks are about people discovering your content (“pull”). Think Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Threads.

The two differ in important ways: dynamics of how they work, how they grow, what consumers care about in a product, what success looks like, tech stack, etc.

The author is conflating the two.

I don't think that's what a social network is necessarily - many people use Facebook entirely as a "friends only" sharing tool, and indeed almost all Facebook activity appears to be between people who know each other in real life. There are social networks that are primarily between strangers (Twitter, TikTok, etc) but that's not a defining feature of all social networks.

For some people, Facebook has moved from being a social network to being more of a private sharing app for sure.

>I don’t know if Apple has the DNA for web-scale consumer social software compared to Meta.

Yeah, they don’t. I’ve been using their cloud stuff since iTools and they’ve always been pure crap. Apple just doesn’t “get” the whole website thing for whatever reason lol

Apple's division in charge for these services is notoriously dysfunctional, multiple Apple employees have warned against joining it on Blind.

Dysfunctional orgs produce dysfunctional outputs.

Apple doesn’t need to ‘get websites’ for this though? It seems like it can entirely bypass DNS and most of the other web paradigms that facebook et al have popularized.

>You can assign identified people to one of your contacts and use that for faceted search.

Now that is a use of the term faceted not yet seen. Wow.

iMessage is a huge part of Apple growth in the USA, as the needle has just flipped to over 50% of US users on iOS I think it will rapidly accelerate.

Not being on iMessage for many Americans is MUCH stranger than not using Facebook.

Interesting internal comms along these lines from 2013: https://www.techemails.com/p/imessage-for-android

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