Facebook Home and Dogfooding
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
They've had so much success in such little time. The Facebook platform managed to get an IPO and is now scrambling to justify its business model. To please shareholders, and partners, they have to "do something". So...they did. They made a mod that does Facebook without clicking on the Facebook icon.
To me, its lame. Then again, I've never created a multi-billion dollar company before. Come to think of it, I've never created a multi-dollar company either. I'm not privy on how to spin a product so that someone is willing to back me with money.
Facebook is an interesting company. To me (and I'm sure to most users) Facebook is just a fancy address book. Yes, it has applications running on and against it, but for the most part its a wall of text and pics to view bits of information.
As for me, I just don't understand what Facebook home is. I understand what it's trying to accomplish. That part is easy and self explanatory. But, what is it really? From what I've seen so far, its just a way to use Facebook without having to "tap" the Facebook icon to ... use Facebook.
That part is very disconcerting to me. Not because, its "Facebook all the time". But, that Facebook really doesn't know what else to do to leverage what its got. It seems like the engineers there are being paid to polish up Facebook over and over again.
Sure, it has a new search feature that they can claim to stock holders and business partners that its even easier to pin point the data needed. Other than that, I have no clue what Facebook will become.
Now, this is just the views of a man on the outside looking in. Facebook does have problems, but I wouldn't mind having those problems right now. You can say all you want about Mark, but he did create something that most people couldn't. And at a very young age. Many would dream to be in a situation where you have changed the world, made billions and still figure out what you want to be when you grow up.
Sorry for the long rant...Wait, no I'm not :p
I honestly think Facebook has peaked as a social hub. I know more people abandoning it now than I ever have before.
Facebook could provide value add, they could pivot, but they seem to be entrenched.
It's a constant surprise to me how, very rapidly, once innovative companies become mired in their past. It's fascinating. It's almost a death wish.
Know what happens to one trick ponies? They get acquired and made irrelevant by some larger non-benevlent entity.
Agree completely. Regardless of whether or not android users would miss their widgets, a big problem is that, just judging from a small local sample of friends and coworkers, no one has any idea just what the point of the app is. Facebook's marketing campaign around this thing is absolutely terrible. From their constant advertising, I've surmised that it's, I don't know, some kind of live updating slideshow of friend's photos? My curiosity is not piqued enough to even bother an install.
The marketing of it is really just terrible, which really puts me off. The strategy of "be even more of a non-current-situation-engaging dickhead in social situations with our app!" I don't see a commercial of someone in an art gallery, ignoring the paintings, ignoring the person their with, and generally just being insufferably over connected and think "y'know, I should get that app."
May just be getting old though..
"Download Facebook Home, its an Android home replacement which includes none of the features of the basic Android launchers that you've been using since the day you got your phone. We'll move all of your stuff behind our wall of Facebook so it becomes more difficult to find."
I'm sure in a lot of cases it comes down to this: "Wait, if I install this I'll lose my weather widget? Forget it."
I don't know how many are actually using it, but I would imagine a lot less (10% of that?)
Of course if you have a big enough brand and enough advertising people will download it, but no amount of advertising will make people continue using a bad product.
> I think more people aren't downloading it because of the bad reviews - which are mainly because of the missing features.
Facebook is a very good utility but it's not everything. The social data might be good for advertisers but we have yet to see a single study where people ditched usual advertising streams for it. And there hasn't been a single innovative/exciting feature from Facebook since the News feed.
It just seems they are trying to be something which they are not. They are struggling at both ends. Can't create a good enough advertising platform nor improve the product from user perspective.
https://github.com/emehrkay/meetup-graph/blob/master/slides....
Or more precisely: it either requires usage, or, at the very least: it needs to be a stepping stone for further innovation, which, at the end of the day is used.
I built an example implementation in python a few months ago:
Facebook Home isn’t an iPhone idea. It’s just a bad idea. Facebook is an app, not a platform. A good home screen interface is one that accommodates any app or service, not just one.
Facebook is a service- a single service- that lots of people use. But those people use a lot of other services too. Facebook isn't as important to people as Facebook obviously likes to believe. Lots of people using Facebook != Lots of people using Facebook lots of time, especially on mobile devices whose entire purpose is to provide information in a portable fashion. They make calls, send texts, and sometimes, yes, make status updates and view images. But they also get directions, play music, display weather notifications, and store reminders.
Facebook handles a couple of these things fairly well at best. Between the fact that it is a single service and that most people I have to imagine are irked by having a social sharing service in between them and every task they want to accomplish on the device is enough to say "the app is good enough for me."
>It’s always a sign of trouble when you’ve built something you don’t want to use yourself.
I'm not convinced that this can be isolated to this alone. I doubt a homescreen alone would make someone want to jump ship from one ecosystem to another
>Why does everyone I know who works at Apple carry an iPhone? Every single one? Not because they have to. It’s because they want to.
I was under the impression that this is an Apple culture thing? It's alleged that if you wear a competitor's brand on Nike Campus, you'll be politely asked to leave (or forced to buy a new pair of shoes while they burn yours). what is Apple's culture's take on this?
>(Doesn’t look like it, judging by the “via Twitter for iPhone” metadata on his recent tweets.
I know Twitter clients can still access the data, I'm guessing there's no easy way to do it
At just about every company there is some level of expectation that you'll use the company's products and not the competitors. It's true that there is a line some where between expecting employees to "back the company" and expecting a cultist devotion to everything they do.
However, not using products that you yourself work on is really bizarre. That's the type of thing that happens in enterprises where you work on projects you are assigned to, not ones you have an interest in. I wouldn't think that's how it works at Facebook.
Just walk around any coffee shop or conference in the Valley. Almost everyone will be using an iPhone. You will very rarely see an Android phone. And pretty much everyone will have a MacBook, of course.
In fact, I have gotten comments from people who have specifically noticed that I own no Apple products, because they find it so strange.
This saddens me: so many hacker types accepting locked down platforms. As with many things in Silly Valley, I suspect it may have more to do with faddishness and hipsterism than anything else. Conferences I've been to (yes, in the valley), have been a pretty mixed bag, and tech enclaves I've known are also fairly light on the Apple product placements.
A healthy dose of dogfooding can go a long ways, I strongly believe; but checking out the competition to see where you stand is also never a bad idea, not to mention that trying out different technologies is just part of being professional. Moderation in all things and all that.
And there's also a big difference from using a competitor to a product that you yourself work on. I'm betting if you go to the ChromeOS division you'll see fewer Macs than elsewhere in the company.
There -was- a heavy dog food culture, and I think that was definitely a good thing.
no easy way to do what?
It's not a huge sacrifice to voluntarily use the best product in a category. The number of Apple employees who want to use a non-iphone device is probably less than two percent.
At other companies, I imagine it would be like working at a car dealer. You could work at a Nissan dealership but still drive a Prius.
You know, I am a huge Apple fan, but I don't like this argument. It suggests there are no valid reasons to prefer Android or even Windows to iOS, when in fact both Android's and Windows's designs offer a number of features that iOS lacks. While I don't think either come within spitting distance of iOS's build quality, there are plenty of reasons to want to use them anyway.
Particularly since Apple is a company which hires plenty of programmers, I imagine there'd be plenty of users who want to use an open-source phone OS. Unless they're all jailbreaking their iPhones, which would be pretty amusing actually.
A lot of Apple employees (cupertino engineering department people, not retail flees or nongineers) walk around with engineering builds on their phones with less handcuffed lockdown. There are clever builds running around in China factories for device bring-up and testing too, but I haven't seen any of those leaked.
there are no valid reasons to prefer Android or even Windows to iOS
I agree. (yay selective quoting!)
But honestly, Windows Mobile (is that what they call it now? Does it have another eight brand identifiers tacked on?) doesn't have enough install base. Everybody in the Sane World™ has an iOS-first and sometimes iOS-only mobile app approach.
As for Android (which is kinda meaningless. It's like saying "Linux" when you're talking about a Linksys router or the entirety of AWS), the rampant security failures, hacks, crapmalware, and the feeling of "it requires as much attention as maintaining a laptop" by people I know puts it right of the running. Maybe it's perfect for somebody who needs a hobby (a lot of people enjoy riding and maintaining motorcycles on the weekend too), but I need my things to work, work well, keep working, and unobtrusively get out of my way after being used.
All that being said, Apple is dead. Apple has no defense against the awesome creepiness of Google Spyware (Now) and that'll drive the future. They can't fight forever. Apple and Google will have to make up eventually. The only saving grace we have is Google is such crap at marketing things, they called their personal assistant "Now" instead of giving it a name and personality people can relate to. People enjoy thinking "Siri" is an actual person. Google doesn't get that. (Hey Google, I'm available to fix all your shit and complete your instrumentality plans. Give me a call.)
And let's not fool ourselves that Apple isn't tracking in such a "spyware" fashion just the same.
To me, Google Now is that thing reading all your email behind the scenes, parsing mostly unstructured text to form a coherent narrative of your life, then prompting you based on what it discovered. It's disturbingly useful and beyond creepy.
The only way Apple can compete with Google Now is if they start to copy all your mail from iOS/OS X Mail.app back to Apple for analysis. They'll probably have an API for "Send this chunk of unstructured data to the users's Apple Action Item processor" for external applications too.
I'd completely forgotten about the insane browser search tracking google now thing. That's another quintillion times creepy.
(Note: it's only creepy because Cloud Cloud Cloud. You're giving up control of your life to Cloud all Praise Cloud. No, you can't have the data. No, you can't run it on your own. No, you can't be private. Cloud Cloud Cloud.)
Its a normal app with normal settings (enter stocks you want to follow, enter sports teams, etc..) that takes some cues from what you search for once you've set up Google now.
Why the hell would Google want to display all the OLD data it has on you in an application called 'Now'?
Flamebait spotted.
Not true. More than half the products I've built during my career I would never use myself. The customers loved them, however, and paid me handsomely.
It's too bad AT&T discontinued it as I was just waiting for my contract to expire.
So, from my experience, I see this as a lack of Facebook getting outside the building and learning from how reviewers and vocal users want to use it. It's great to try something innovative but you need to foster a community around it so your message is amplified above the chorus of naysayers.
If you're interested in Facebook Home, you can still get any recent Android phone and install the app as your device Home screen.
Source: http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/05/13/htc-first-att-offici...
Wait, why is he using Twitter at all?
They've had so much success in such little time