Facebook kills startups with new collaborative photo album feature
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
> But we’re deadpooling all of ‘em, effective immediately.
I really don't like the tone of many parts of this article.
> Facebook is just too big to fail when it comes to normal people and photos.
The same could have been said about places.
"Again and again, we warned y’all that Facebook, owner of all photos of people on the Internet and the most popular mobile photo app, was going to crush you eventually."
It really boggles the mind.
Which is why they didn't have to worry about some silly mobile app with ridiculous 'filters' that only teenagers use when they want to feel artsy.
Facebook likely won't make the same mistake of allowing something similar to happen again.
It's easy for some people to go overboard or act like they're a deeply intellectual thinker just because they've taken a brooding selfie in black and white, but misuse shouldn't be conflated with uselessness.
I suspect most of these were headed there anyway, no offense to anyone working on them.
I respect a fellow coder's work. I'm sure a lot of hard work went into all those applications listed there (of which, frankly, I haven't heard, because if I want to share something with my friends I upload it on my server and be done with it), but people ought to be more aware of their own smallness. You don't base your enterprise on making (and hosting, and maintaining!) the nth fucking website that essentially offers something that should simply be a feature of a social network. Especially if it's something like a shared album. Who the hell invests money into a business whose end product is basically one week's work away for the company which already provides services to 99.99% percent of the people need that product?
Wishing for a niche to be there doesn't magically make it poof into existence.
technically, yahoo,google and microsoft(icq,myspace,friendter too) had all the resources to create most of the now popular online services like insagram, facebook, tumblr but they did not and now are buying these or compete with them fruitlessly.
couldn't facebook create an app with filters? yes, but they bought instagram because of the userbase. so I agree with you that these are bad investments but only when the projects don't have something that could not be recreated with few engineers.
I guess that's the risk with any entrepreneurial work, that someone will get to market faster or build on an existing user base (in this case, a completely unmatchable user base). Surely though, if a whole business idea can be trumped by a new feature on someone else's site, that'd warrant some stronger scrutiny.
Facebook is a place for photos of people's faces, really. If the artifacts prevent you from seeing someone's face, the picture is probably too small to begin with. Putting other kinds of photos on Facebook (like, say, Cinnabon(TM)) always baffled me, but people do it anyway.
As soon as they find they don't become Robert Cappa or Steve McCurry overnight, that fad will come to pass...
CD systems' speakers (when not Hi-Fi) have worse sound than middle of the road headphones, and cassette had like 8 bit definition (and noise, wow, flutter and other nice stuff to degrade the sound).
This article is both hyperbolic and patronizing.
If the article stated, "don't bother building another OS, Microsoft have that market sewn up", I think we would all equally call bullshit.
Yes, Facebook is a behemoth in the photo space. But there are many facets to people's photo libraries than mere sharing and collaboration. I've actually been happy to see fellow photo start ups tackling some of hose more interesting problems.
No doubt this solves a pain point for many. But I don't know if I see it as crushing many startups. The thing with Facebook is that people will come up with ways to work around the limitations of the platform. It's got that much momentum.
Photos are a big space and I'm happy to see other companies tackling more than just the social sharing problems that in my opinion have largely been solved already.
Demo:
https://rrc.imp.blib.us/link/album/private?albumid=117bc3 Password: 1234
If you wanted your own: https://register.blib.us
If not, I'll stop working on/maintaining it and devote my time to other pursuits - preferably ones that might bring in some money eventually.
PS: It is currently running on a Heroku instance because I can't afford to 'launch' it yet. :(
To be completely honest, I haven't really thought about that. I haven't really really looked into that either.
However, I am basing this attempt on the belief that, if Twitter, TwitPic and Instagram can 'show' me your photos when I search for a particular hashtag, it automatically implies that each of them have acquired the redistribution rights.
At no point in the process am I claiming that I own these photos; in fact, all the photos link back to their original places. I'm merely collating symbolic links to them. In a sense, I'm (sort of) indexing them just the way a search engine would.
Am I making sense or am I being escapist with my answers here? Do let me know. I'd like to believe I am not breaking any laws or infringing any copyrights but IANAL, so I'm not really sure. :)
Thanks for the insightful question. You made me realize something that I had completely missed in my enthusiasm to code. :)