
Lightbox is joining Facebook - revorad
http://blog.lightbox.com/post/23107101360/lightbox-is-joining-facebook
======
scott_s
I understand that people are disappointed that a service and community they
like will no longer be around. But the sense of entitlement I see in the
comments on their blog is frustrating - saying "I am disappointed _in you_ "
(emphasis mine) is what you say to your children, not a peer who is providing
you a service. I translate their reactions to "I am disappointed that you are
no longer willing to take the kind of financial and professional risk that I
am not willing or able to make."

~~~
wavephorm
Anyone who complains about this obviously never was willing to pay enough for
the product/service to make it viable -- THEY are the problem, not the site
owner. People need to pay for what they like or what is here today might not
be here tomorrow. Way too many people have this expectation that everything on
the internet must be free.

~~~
endlessvoid94
if you don't pay for a product, you are the product.

~~~
endianswap
I hear this all the time but I don't agree with it. For example, am I "the
product" because I don't pay for Ubuntu when I install it on my servers?

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Animus7
Yes, it could be argued.

You're the product because FOSS developers make money almost exclusively
through consulting and support. By using Ubuntu you're putting yourself into
that pool.

So you could think of Linux distros as a means of producing support customers,
and I don't think that's too far removed from reality.

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unreal37
The comments on the blog post are interesting.

I have never been in the position of having to decide between a $1 million a
year job offer or continuing to provide a free service and struggling to
figure out monetization of that living on $5000 a month. Tough choice, and the
users are pissed, but its not our choice to make - its theirs. Congrats to
them.

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pestaa
In the last hour 14 comments were posted on the article. None of them welcomed
the change. Same here. It says something about Facebook.

It is so sad to see so bright engineers producing great software[0] for such a
dubious machinery.

[0] <https://github.com/facebook/phabricator>
<http://wiki.github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/>

~~~
koko775
Evan Priestley (lead on Phabricator) doesn't actually work for Facebook
anymore. And he's doing what he like. What's so dubious about that?

~~~
pestaa
Not sure if we disagree at all. I consider him not working for Facebook a good
thing.

Good engineers should not work for bad companies. I know there are good
engineers at Facebook, what I'm not sure about is that Facebook itself is
good.

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brink
Part of me dies when I see a small, innovative application get bought up and
shut down by a much larger, more founded business. I want to see good ideas
succeed on the internet. I don't want to see great ideas get phased out time
after time by larger companies.

~~~
joering2
I am with you! This should be a bulletpoint in a mission statement for every
startup:

\- if we get a reasonable traction with our userbase (which means you like our
product), we promise not to sell to a bigger player, unless they promise not
to close the doors within next 2 years.

or something like that...

~~~
anon1385
Nobody is going to invest in startups like that. The startups that get bought
and the product shelved, those are the successes for the VCs, incubators and
other investors. The startups that steadily build up a product with a decent
user-base, eventually making a small profit after several years, these are the
failures, and are subsidised by the 'successes'. The big players aren't that
interested in buying products: an existing product is just baggage, and one
that they are forced to maintain even more so.

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k-mcgrady
I find the number of negative comments when startups sell (particularly to big
companies like Facebook) interesting. It seems a lot of people start tech
companies with the goal of 'changing the world'. When they see other startups
sell they see them as sell-outs. A lot of people seem to forget - this is
business. When you have investors the goal is to make money. If the best
chance at doing that is to sell then that is what you should do.

I don't think the rumours that Google tried to buy Digg years ago were ever
confirmed. But if Digg did sell they probably would have seen this sort of
backlash. They didn't sell and now are gradually fading away - and I've seen
them mocked for not selling when they had the chance.

I think it reflects badly on the tech community when they can't celebrate an
innovative company being bought by another innovative company.

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skrish
I wonder what will be the tipping point when 'companies' stop trusting SAAS
companies. I understand this is not a business critical function or anything,
but my point is about services that could impact businesses due to talent
hiring & subsequent shutdown.

In the purchasing department of enterprise companies, there is usually a
questionnaire to assess the business continuity aspect.

Unless companies make an upfront commitment establishing their seriousness to
run the business without affecting those using them it is quite hard to build
the trust in the long run.

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vibrunazo
> In the coming weeks, we will be open sourcing portions of the code we’ve
> written for Lightbox and posting them to our Github repository.

Am I the only one who gets super excited like a little girl with this new
trend open sourcing if you close your company?

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davycro
Photos are Facebook's achilles heel. A few of my friends have deleted their FB
account, most of them returned a few months later, when I asked why, they said
they missed the photos.

Facebooks core design, social networking, restricts them from making a great
photo service. I think there is space for an app that provides people with a
way to share hiqh quality photos. Not just mobile photos, but photos from
SLRs. Like when 10 people go on a ski vacation and want to make a group photo
album. Or 4 college students living in a party house want an album where
people who attend their parties can upload their photos. An app like
Divvyshot.

Divvyshot, Instagram, now Lightbox. Any app that has the slightest potential
of disrupting the photo-space is a threat to Facebook. They are smart to buy
them out.

~~~
joshuahedlund
There were many potential reasons for Facebook to buy Instagram, and while
"buy out potential competitors" was a good one I wondered how much that really
had to do with it. I think this new buy-out increases the evidence for that
theory, though, and I wonder how that affects the future longevity of social
networks. MySpace never had the money to buy out Facebook.

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pdubs
That's a very...abrupt way to send off your users. If I were a Lightbox user
or investor I'd be a bit irked.

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jerf
I doubt the investors were caught by surprise...

~~~
pdubs
Certainly not, but I assume it's not quite the payout they were hoping for.

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abuzzooz
Congrats to the Lightbox team.

Admittedly, I never used Lightbox (nor Instagram for that matter), but it
seems like Facebook is really terrified of photo-centric startups, and
gobbling them up as soon as they show any promise. Why is that?

~~~
bgilroy26
Twitter duplicates a lot of the wall/status part of Facebook, and you'll
notice hardly anyone has a social media suite that copies Facebook statuses to
Twitter, it's always the other way around.

Nobody really cares about Facebook games. The business pages are there for the
users, and the users are there to share photos.

One of the most attractive things about the HN community is that people
understand that the big business opportunities are connected to pre-existing
human domains of activity transformed.

Facebook has taken the whole activity of bringing a carousel of slides over to
your neighbour's house and showing them your trip to Peru and put it under one
roof. That is a big deal.

On the other hand, just like Googlers always say, "the competition is only a
click away". The strength and ease of use of Facebook also derives from
digital photography. Any other website can take advantage of how much easier
it is to share digital photos and the future competitor will likely enjoy a
similar opportunity to scale up because the departure from Facebook will start
as a trickle and grow slowly before tipping over in the same nightmare
scenario that Mark Zuckerberg awakes from in a cold sweat every night.

His destiny is controlled by the 100,000,000 users in aggregate. While there's
a great deal of inertia in that many people, you can't deny the flexibility of
the Web.

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corpix
That bit about Lightbox letting users keep their photos is very interesting.
That pretty much kills the photos that were being shared and my guess is few
of those will be migrated to fb. So a vibrantly competitive app & community is
killed-off to protect their $1b investment in Instagram?

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CyrusL
I'm surprised they commented on the company and user data not being purchased.
Maybe it's to manage concerns over how Facebook handles privacy.

Also, doesn't this screw investors? I guess if you're hunting for homeruns it
doesn't matter if you get a small piece of an acquihire or not.

~~~
leoedin
I think other Facebook acquisitions I've seen recently have had similar
comments in their blog posts. It's exceedingly clear that Facebook is doing
talent acquisitions and nothing more.

~~~
bstpierre
Are the investors getting money out of these deals, or is FB just recruiting
away the talent?

If the investors are getting screwed, I would expect to see new terms on
employment agreements in an effort to protect their capital.

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welp
I wonder whether these guys will end up working on increased integration with
other acquisitions (e.g., Instagram, assuming that all goes well with the
antitrust investigation with the FTC), or potentially even on other other
services themselves? I'm looking forward to seeing Facebook's plans with photo
sharing -- especially after Facebook's post earlier[1] highlighting the
increased prominence of photos in their mobile app.

[1]
[https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150978179604009....](https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150978179604009.480463.234232874008&type=1)

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pilom
So if the users have their data and the app is open-sourced, what prevents
someone from starting the app up again (besides the friction to users)?

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xpose2000
Congratulations to the lightbox guys. This is what every start-up aspires to
do!

~~~
ceejayoz
I really, really doubt the folks at Square are sitting around aspiring to
being bought and shut down by Facebook.

~~~
Domenic_S
Money doesn't matter to a payments company? Hmm...

There's always a price.

~~~
ceejayoz
> Money doesn't matter to a payments company? Hmm...

Thanks for that non sequitur. Where on earth did you get the impression that I
was arguing money doesn't matter to Square?

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Domenic_S
From your saying they don't aspire to be bought.

Perhaps they don't _aspire_ to be bought, in that there is no "go get
acquired" in their mission statement. But when the GP said that Lightbox
achieved "what every startup aspires to" I took that to mean a cashout or
working on something even bigger, or perhaps "success" generally.

~~~
ceejayoz
I very much doubt Square aspires to be bought. I suspect they aspire to being
so successful they get too big for anyone to even _consider_ buying them.

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TommyDANGerous
What isn't joining Facebook these days.

