Facebook Tells Parse Developers “No Plans To Change How App Data Is Used”
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Before being acquired by Facebook, there was a non-trivial probability that Parse would not be around for the long run. Being backed by a large company that isn't going away anytime soon makes Parse a viable option for larger businesses that are more risk averse than smaller startups/developer shops. Early adopters are great for shaping a product, but the majority of the money is in those risk averse enterprises. In other words, being acquired by Facebook hops Parse to the other side of the chasm [1]. There was a similar effect with Heroku being acquired by Salesforce.
I'm not sure what the long term effects of being associated with Facebook's brand are going to be, but there generally is a lot of short term vitriol associated with anything Facebook does that eventually ends up being inconsequential; if I were Parse, I wouldn't be too concerned, especially when their actual numbers indicate developers haven't lost faith in them.
...except that's not the case at all. Look at face.com - once they were acquired by Facebook they all but shut down their API several months later.
I'm not suggesting this will happen with Parse - but it's naive to think that being acquired by someone means existing customers are even more secure than they were before.
Keyword: currently
So yeah, we all rag on Facebook pretty hard here. What I'm most interested in is, if the uptick in adoption for Parse is true, why do developers feel more comfortable now that Facebook owns the product/company? Given the general pessimism about Facebook's fostering of their own API, and their laughable advocacy of privacy this whole article smacks of PR.
In my mind the whole modus operandi of companies like Facebook and Google is to absorb and mine as much information as possible. So if they aren't going to peek and analyze did they really just buy Parse for the API expertise?
This happens with the majority of acquisitions that, as soon as they are acquired they see an uptick in signups. The uptick would be more interesting if they announced it in a month’s time or in an even longer period of time. There are several reasons for this including, the perception of “X has acquired them and they’re a massive company which means that the service will be around for a while” (which is not necessarily true) and the fact that, the acquired company gets a lot of press from areas they may previously not have done so they get new users either as customers or simply joining to ‘look’ at the service – although they may not become actual valuable users – by those I mean ‘look’ at the service, I’m talking about other employees of the acquiring company, shareholders of the acquiring company etc.
I had heard of Parse via Hacker News, but didn't ever pay attention to what they did. After the news of the purchase I looked at their offering and said, "This is exactly what I need for my next project."
The first comment is right, currently being the keyword.
However, the most public change to Instagram that many blamed on facebook were the ToS changes that I've heard led to a non-trivial dip in engagement (the primary metric for facebook leadership):
Original Story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4936561
Response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4939849
Backpedal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4950853
I have a very good friend who works at Parse, and I have nothing but deep respect and admiration for him and his work. He is well-deserving of this exit. He does not subscribe to the pessimism about the new 'facebook overlords.' I've known him long enough that I would expect him to tell me if that weren't the case.
Will facebook always keep to its PR statements? Only as long as they makes sense for their business... I'd vote 6 months to a year, personally :)
The only thing they really have done, is launched on the web (they just launched on Android a few days before the acquisition) and scaled up the Instagram team. Likewise, they also enlarged photos on Facebook itself (although that was for everyone not just Instagram) - the fact that they haven’t even given them a tab in their app shows how autonomously Facebook have let Instagram run since acquiring it etc.
Having said that, Instagram now has to play by Facebook’s rules and I expect that we’re more likely to see further integration between the two going forward this year such as advertising etc.
I'm currently investigating migration plans and checking the stability of my Fast Lists app if I just delete the API key on Parse. I only use Parse for logging and crash reporting and all access goes through a shim class so that I can swap and replace at a single point.
I'm trying to pick a good way of crash logging at the moment as I'm fed up of manually symbolicating. Crashlytics, crittercism and Flurry look nice but I'm not keen on their privacy policies. Hockey app might do the job but doesn't look as slick and the initial install instructions aren't completely clear. I'm also trying to get JIRA and Mobile Connect working although I'm not sure if that does the symbolisation.
Suggestions welcome.
Also, who owns the data?