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Comment by gattac_janitor | Hacker News Reader

What products has Meta developed internally after Facebook that have been a success? I am actually asking this question, it seems like they have only had success purchasing already ramping products, plowing cash into them, and cross-integrating them into their product set. Why wouldn't they just continue to lean into that profile and wait for people with actual good ideas solve this.

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Facebook marketplace killed craigslist, I guess?

Sure, it's part of Facebook but it's not the same as the core product.

Meta glasses are very successful, so much that Google, Samsung and reportedly Apple are looking to get in on the game.

Threads? They have 400m monthly active users and 100m+ daily active users. Though, its userbase likely does not intersect with your interests.

Meta Ray-Ban glasses are also a massive success.

I really doubt that 400M number. They try to get me to login to Threads see comments on Instagram posts. Technically I am monthly "active" user, but not really.

I see more Bluesky links in the wild than Threads and they claim only 27M users.

Threads is taking off in regions likely irrelevant to your interests (India, Taiwan, Japan, Brazil, etc). The content on Threads covers national politics and local social issues, which would typically not be shared on a tech forum like this one.

Tech news is still dominated by X and bluesky, so naturally those content sources appear more here.

Threads is an internally developed Twitter clone when Twitter launched in 2006 and Threads launched in 2023? I'm not saying they didn't build it, but it was not an original product design; they waited until there was already a market, launched and deployed it to Facebook users. I will give you the Ray-Ban glasses, but even that was a product that is a better version of Google Glass, so still not really a unique product.

Sure, it's not original or unique, but that wasn't your question. Facebook itself wasn't particularly unique when it launched.

The person is likely going through the 5 stages of coping.

1. The product isn't useful

2. The product is useful but nobody is using it.

3. Ok, a lot of people are using it but nobody is buying it.

4. Ok, some people are buying it but the product is not innovative. Somebody invented it first. <--- the person is here.

5. Ok, the product is innovative but it's not like it will cure cancer!!!

i am surprise ai glasses are not more popular. i would love to wear those to appliance store and get info about appliance quickly.

is there any alternative ray ban meta . i hate buying from zuck.

The creep factor of AI glasses is high. That was a contributing factor to the failure of Google Glass, and I’ve seen various reports of places moving to ban the Meta glass. People, in general, are not comfortable with a camera pointed at them. People walking around with cameras on their face that may or may not be recording is not something the average person wants as a common thing.

yes my sons daycare has posters saying these glasses are banned

Same, I hope there will be more alternatives in the future. Samsung is releasing Smart Glasses soon with Android for example.

Why would you want zuck's minions to see everything that you see when you put on the ray bans?

Same with this pendant eavesdropping device.

Why was it trivial for FB to scale WhatsApp from 450,000,000 users at acquisition to over 3,300,000,000 now?

Seems like an insane achievement to scale a messaging service to half of the world.

8x scaling over a time period where the available size and performance of single-image systems increased by more than 8x seems… if not trivial, at least not an “insane achievement.”

Scaling a product like that is an incredible engineering achievement, but I am speaking specifically about product development. What other products has Facebook innovated internally, worked through the product-market fit, and scaled itself? Again, my point is that they have a ton of resources and a huge existing user base, but the only successes they seem to have are purchasing companies that are ramping. They deploy engineers and connect to the existing user base, but they aren't innovative in product design.

facebook itself is a myspace or nexopia clone

the targetting pixel and like button are the most obvious innovations?

facebook is a tool for building products on, rather than a product in and of itself.

Was it just because WhatsApp was already generally well designed when they purchased it?

I think that might be common enough these days through sound horizontal scaling principals and especially services that scale for you, but Whatsapp launched in 2009, pretty much the turning point for the tech that enables "web scale".

At that time AWS was just rolling out ELB and RDS, people were still fulfilling their (and most) roles on EC2 servers or even more likely dedicated servers / VPS that took day(s) to commission and might have even been setup by hand, there was no Docker, GitHub was new and Actions, Jenkins etc were years away, and there were very few PaaS- or IaaS-type offerings IIRC just a very nascent Heroku and Google App Engine.

WhatsApp was built on Erlang, though, which was built to scale in the 80s.

ejabberd right?

“Scaling” as in “making sure the infrastructure can handle much higher load”, or as in “making sure the product remains genuinely useful to people, so that the user numbers go up and not down”? For both, it didn’t happen by itself, but it’s far from rocket science. A sane team of 15-20 people can do it.

Scaling a product from 0 to 450 MM is a humongous achievement.

Going from 450 to 3300 seems rather small in terms of technical achievement. If you can serve 450 you can serve 3300 MM frankly.

Complete nonsense, as anyone who has worked on a service with scale would know. WhatsApp is not even close to the same architecture as it was at the time of acquisition.

Not to mention the load constraints did not grow 7x, it's orders of magnitude more load increase than that.

As the world's mobile data speeds have skyrocketed in speeds and plummeted in price, WhatsApp is now handling orders of magnitude more data per user than when they served merely 450. And it's all complicated rich media which was not handled at the time.

WhatsApp's file limit at the time of acquisition was 16 MB. Today, it's 2 GB. Per file. It didn't have voice or video calling at acquisition either, also highly complex and expensive to run.

WhatsApp grew 7x in user base, but the scale of data and technical complexity grew exponentially more.

If this were so easy, history would not be littered with high profile scaling failures from messaging apps. Most notably Signal, which couldn't handle a 1.5x influx of users from WhatsApp and was down for weeks.

Claiming a 7x scale is technically easy while your data-per-user growth grows probably 50% a year or more is patently ridiculous.

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