Lightbox is joining Facebook
blog.lightbox.com
blog.lightbox.com
The users might feel used.
You're the product because FOSS developers make money almost exclusively through consulting and support. By using Ubuntu you're putting yourself into that pool.
So you could think of Linux distros as a means of producing support customers, and I don't think that's too far removed from reality.
I have never been in the position of having to decide between a $1 million a year job offer or continuing to provide a free service and struggling to figure out monetization of that living on $5000 a month. Tough choice, and the users are pissed, but its not our choice to make - its theirs. Congrats to them.
It is so sad to see so bright engineers producing great software[0] for such a dubious machinery.
[0] https://github.com/facebook/phabricator http://wiki.github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/
Good engineers should not work for bad companies. I know there are good engineers at Facebook, what I'm not sure about is that Facebook itself is good.
- if we get a reasonable traction with our userbase (which means you like our product), we promise not to sell to a bigger player, unless they promise not to close the doors within next 2 years.
or something like that...
I hope they open it enough for someone else to pick it up.
I don't think the rumours that Google tried to buy Digg years ago were ever confirmed. But if Digg did sell they probably would have seen this sort of backlash. They didn't sell and now are gradually fading away - and I've seen them mocked for not selling when they had the chance.
I think it reflects badly on the tech community when they can't celebrate an innovative company being bought by another innovative company.
In the purchasing department of enterprise companies, there is usually a questionnaire to assess the business continuity aspect.
Unless companies make an upfront commitment establishing their seriousness to run the business without affecting those using them it is quite hard to build the trust in the long run.
Am I the only one who gets super excited like a little girl with this new trend open sourcing if you close your company?
Facebooks core design, social networking, restricts them from making a great photo service. I think there is space for an app that provides people with a way to share hiqh quality photos. Not just mobile photos, but photos from SLRs. Like when 10 people go on a ski vacation and want to make a group photo album. Or 4 college students living in a party house want an album where people who attend their parties can upload their photos. An app like Divvyshot.
Divvyshot, Instagram, now Lightbox. Any app that has the slightest potential of disrupting the photo-space is a threat to Facebook. They are smart to buy them out.
But what can you expect if you don't pay the company anything?
Admittedly, I never used Lightbox (nor Instagram for that matter), but it seems like Facebook is really terrified of photo-centric startups, and gobbling them up as soon as they show any promise. Why is that?
Nobody really cares about Facebook games. The business pages are there for the users, and the users are there to share photos.
One of the most attractive things about the HN community is that people understand that the big business opportunities are connected to pre-existing human domains of activity transformed.
Facebook has taken the whole activity of bringing a carousel of slides over to your neighbour's house and showing them your trip to Peru and put it under one roof. That is a big deal.
On the other hand, just like Googlers always say, "the competition is only a click away". The strength and ease of use of Facebook also derives from digital photography. Any other website can take advantage of how much easier it is to share digital photos and the future competitor will likely enjoy a similar opportunity to scale up because the departure from Facebook will start as a trickle and grow slowly before tipping over in the same nightmare scenario that Mark Zuckerberg awakes from in a cold sweat every night.
His destiny is controlled by the 100,000,000 users in aggregate. While there's a great deal of inertia in that many people, you can't deny the flexibility of the Web.
Also, doesn't this screw investors? I guess if you're hunting for homeruns it doesn't matter if you get a small piece of an acquihire or not.
If the investors are getting screwed, I would expect to see new terms on employment agreements in an effort to protect their capital.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150978179604009....
We're just disagreeing with the statement that sell-and-shut-down is what every startup aspires to.
There's always a price.
Thanks for that non sequitur. Where on earth did you get the impression that I was arguing money doesn't matter to Square?
Perhaps they don't aspire to be bought, in that there is no "go get acquired" in their mission statement. But when the GP said that Lightbox achieved "what every startup aspires to" I took that to mean a cashout or working on something even bigger, or perhaps "success" generally.