Facebook launches App Center
newsroom.fb.com
newsroom.fb.com
I think I might need to get my consumerism rotated.
And Facebook is going to fail when they release products other than ads?
The saturation point has been reached and there's very little original thought left, just endless regurgitation of shallow "analysis".
FB will do what FB does.
What is up with Facebook and US-only products? Their Camera app is not available in most countries. Even their app for managing Pages isn't available in my app store (they still keep showing me the annoying message to download it). And it takes them literally order of magnitude of months (if ever) to get their products worldwide, like with Facebook check-ins.
Terms of use have to be drafted and reviewed by lawyers for each country. This will take time. Why go through all that trouble and wait months if you can gain valuable insights by a quick launch in your most importanht market?
(And then proceed to put up huge banners in the other apps hassling users to download the new facebook camera and pages apps - even going so far as to provide a button that sends you an international SMS with a link that doesn't even work)
Very few countries have internationalization as a necessity. For most places, having the app in native language is a plus, but most people still frequently use the web in English.
I mean, Instagram could figure all the rollout challenges with a single digit amount of people. One would expect a post-IPO company to do so too.
Compare the FB page with http://www.apple.com/iphone/from-the-app-store/
And you will have a good enough product but never an awesome one, as "later" never comes, and when it comes the person that created the feature is not in the company or is not available or does not remember why he did it the way he did it or they are cascade bugs....
This approach was used by American cars and was very good for testing different things while the industry evolved, but when industry matured the Japanese(and German) with the "stop the assembly line until the bug is fixed" won.
Sometimes good enough wins, some time perfectionism does.
From his video: "Actually one of the core values of Facebook is is "Move fast." And we used to write this down by saying, "Move fast and break things." And the idea was, unless you are breaking some stuff you are not moving fast enough. I think that's still basically true. I mean, right now, we've optimized so much of our culture around just making it so that people can come and build things quickly. Right, whether it's everything from having the right tools in the right development environment to build things quickly, to nightly code pushes, hiring the best people who have a bias towards just pushing things very quickly, very entrepreneurial. The whole culture is tuned around that. And I think there's probably something in that for other entrepreneurs to learn which is that making mistakes is okay. At the end of the day, the goal of building something is to build something not to not make mistakes." http://www.sweetspeeches.com/s/1889-mark-zuckerberg-moving-f...
I didn't think anyone would argue against it as it's how most startups build. Besides software is never 'done' correct?
Design is very important IMO. You think the majority of fb users will say 'oh look at those nice features'? I bet you not, they'll say I like Facebook or I don't like Facebook because that's how they feel. Design highly influences the user's feelings.
Are they anything more than a filter on the existing app stores based on my friends usage? What is my motivation as a user to install their app store?
Also, I checked the Privacy settings on my Facebook account and it is not clear how to ensure my app usage is not shared with others. Features first, respect of users' privacy last.
It then appears they show you the Apple App Store.
This could lead to easier app discovery.
1) You friend uses Pinterest or Spotify and has a wall post from it.
2) You are interested so you follow the link to that app.
3) You follow a link to the new app store.
4) The app store provides downloads for iOS / Android / desktop / etc.
The point from Facebook's end is that step (3) would currently be a link outside of Facebook. If they can keep that inside, better for them.
just like the itunes did for apple.
just imagine if your startup is fb's "promoted website of the week for travel", the possibilities are endless for you.
all of this is of course moot, if fb doesn't promote their app center. as long as they promote it, offer discounts (the way amazon does for their appstore with their "free paid app a day", i think fb could change the way startups are promoted on the web. (itunes already does some of this for the pure mobile play.)