

Facebook Messaging: scorned by nerds, built for teens like candy-covered crack - Brokenbottleboy
http://brokenbottleboy.tumblr.com/post/1583250140/facebook-messaging-scorned-by-nerds-built-for

======
mayanklahiri
This raises the larger question about how much influence hackers and
developers really have in terms of product adoption. There seem to be two
schools of thought:

(1) Hackers/nerds are early adopters. Thus, they will influence "normal"
people to use products that they judge to be superior.

(2) Hackers/nerds are a tiny proportion of the population with no real
influence. They might push esoteric but superior technologies, but large-scale
adoption will ultimately be driven by how quickly cat pictures can be shared
with the largest group of people.

The author of the article clearly believes in (2), but Apple seems to be
making money off (1). So which is it? Or is this some sort of false dichotomy
to begin with?

~~~
ohyes
"Or is this some sort of false dichotomy to begin with?"

Yes.

When you are starting out, you need that first critical mass of people to get
your service going. Those are the nerds looking for the next 'cool' thing.

Once you have a service going, you can ditch the nerds, they are a small
segment of the population. Instead pander to the lowest common denominator. I
don't see how Apple is making money off (1).

I'm a nerd and I haven't owned an Apple product recently (disclosure: I had a
B&W G3 in the late 90s; it was sick, I mean, firewire and usb, man).

The iPod was not the first mp3 player. (In fact, it had worse specs and a
higher price than its contemporaries back in the day...)

And with their computers, I mean, realistically, they are making money off of
overpriced hardware running warmed-over BSD. Sure, its got a fancy skin, but
the in terms of the substantive stuff, it is BSD.

Where they really make money is incredibly amazingly great marketing and an
increasingly loyal user population. You could say that the loyal group of
users is due to 'superior' something or other (tech ux, etc.).

This might be true, but i can't imagine them actually winning market capital
with those. Where they really win are with the commercials that I can't
friggin' get out of my head.

So sure, false dichotomy, and no one ever made money off of (1), (1) is kind
of the price you pay to jumpstart your market.

~~~
jacobolus
> _but the in terms of the substantive stuff, it is BSD. Where they really
> make money is incredibly amazingly great marketing_

This is just insulting flamebait.

~~~
ohyes
How so?

I'm baffled by how this is flame baiting.

They have amazing marketing! They have great stores! It looks great!

On a technical level, I don't see how the OS and hardware are better than, for
example, BSD or Linux on Intel hardware (same hardware)!

I honestly want to know what exactly is better from a geek perspective.

If you can tell me, I'll go out and buy one. I've looked at them and I haven't
seen anything.

~~~
jacobolus
It’s flamebait because your implication is that anyone who uses it or likes it
is only doing so because it is well marketed/trendy. That is insulting, for
obvious reasons, to anyone who uses it because they believe it is legitimately
superior.

Frankly though, your argument is just wrong, on the merits. Most BSD
distributions have nothing like the set of tools and APIs that Apple ships
with OS X: they don’t have interface tools rivaling interface builder (at
least that I’ve seen), they don’t have the APIs for sound and images, they
don’t have the APIs for speech synthesis and speech recognition, they don’t
have the APIs for integration with a built-in address book, they don’t have
APIs for rich typographical support, or printing, or so easily connecting
interfaces with a database backend, or doing 3d transformations to portions of
an interface, etc. etc. etc.

Your basic claim is that there is no value added in all of the stuff described
here,
[http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/navigation/#section=R...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/navigation/#section=Resource%20Types&topic=Reference)
and that anyone who believes otherwise is just some kind of pawn of Apple’s
marketing machine.

I mean, heck, it takes a 1000 page book just to describe the _low-level_ parts
of OS X: <http://osxbook.com/book/toc/toc.html>

The further implication is that things like well-supported hardware that comes
in predictable configurations, very good technical support for developers who
run into difficulty, a large ecosystem of high quality applications and
discriminating users, etc. etc. are all unimportant compared to your personal
opinion of whether something is sufficiently technically innovative.

To be honest there’s really not that much in any computer system, in terms of
groundbreaking ideas, that wasn’t in Doug Englebart’s “mother of all demos”,
or in the Smalltalk machines at PARC. So one could argue I guess that
everything done since the 70s is uninteresting and derivative. But there’s a
world of difference between the ideas and a solid production implementation.

------
hrabago
I was just talking to my wife yesterday about this concept of "not for nerds,
but rather for teens" when I was describing an iPhone app I'm working on. The
app as it is now works exactly the way I want it to work, then I realized that
_I_ may not be the demo I should be targeting.

At this point, my options are to redesign and reprogram the app to appeal more
to teens, or release what I have now and go for people looking for utility,
then after that work on a version for people looking for fun.

------
codexon
I'm amazed this blog post devoid of content or insight is #1.

His 4 paragraph message boils down to: "It wasn't made for techies." The same
message that has been said about the Ipad, Macbook Air, Kindle and countless
others.

~~~
Brokenbottleboy
I know. I'm just awful aren't I?

------
swombat
Spot on. Consider that IM client which got a million users in a couple of
weeks a short while ago... that's the market that FB Messaging has to be
aiming at, surely. And with 500 million users to seed it with, they'll get to
a million active users in about 10 minutes.

~~~
joe_the_user
But given their huge size, I actually don't think they necessarily benefit
from generating a bunch of users of a new service.

The question is how this changes the Facebook and whether it will benefit
Facebook.

~~~
frofro
Existing users will be locked in even more to Facebook. New users will sign up
as many of their friends start to rely on the new service.

~~~
panacea
Exactly. Which is why when the linked writer finishes his snarky observation
with: "Facebook Messaging is bad? No. It just isn’t built for you."

I pause for a moment.

I think it's equally lucid to think "but I don't want to step onto your lawn!"
as it is to denigrate the "get off my lawn" mentality.

The privacy implications wavered by others, if not frivolously, then for other
reasons, are still of concern to me. Regardless of whether or not I'm happy to
waiver them myself.

------
rodericksilva
Great point on this article. FB is starting to remind me of AOL. AOL users
didn't care that you could run IE outside of AOL WWW or that you could use
Thunderbird instead of AOL mail. Just make it simple and keep it simple. Good
job.

~~~
apl
Does that mean Facebook will vanish completely over the next 10 years and turn
into a punchline? Simplicity comes in different forms; I suspect that FB is
actually aiming for the wrong kind in this case.

------
biznickman
Best explanation that I've read yet. Concise and to the point.

~~~
jimmyjazz14
and manages to include the phrase "raging woody".

~~~
Brokenbottleboy
I'm so pleased someone else thought that was funny.

------
phlux
I was writing about this last week here on HN; but decided to kill the comment
as I felt maybe I was being too pessimistic/critical:

I stated that FB has the Toys R Us business model: People are always producing
kids; the internet always has new generations coming online. They are building
for the COMING generations -- not the current.

Another here on HN summed it up best: FB's new messaging platform is for those
who think FB _IS_ the internet.

Additionally, this is further reason why I would not want/use a FB payment
system. I dont want to have to be logged into FB / have an account on FB in
order to pay something.

We have all seen how maverick Zuck is with others' privacy...

Disclaimer: I have never, nor shall I ever, had a FB account. I refuse to
participate. While I see the value it provides others - I have been perfectly
happy to not have had an account - and even gone as far as asking friends and
girlfriends not to post pics or any other info about me to the site.

~~~
gojomo
There was a comment that struck me as a little odd, and a lot revealing, in
the official Facebook announcement by Joel Seligstein
(<http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=452288242130>):

 _I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like
Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with
the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From "hey nice to
meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer
practice at 6 pm tonight." That's a really cool idea._

Cool, yes, but also a little spooky.

~~~
angusgr
Privacy aside, have you ever tried to look something up from a few months ago,
let alone (hypothetically) 20 years ago?

This is one of my absolute dislikes with both Facebook and Twitter - you pile
all your data in there, they keep it all and own it all, and make it a royal
pain for you to get at it again - even just for simple things like "I wonder
when I was in XYZ?" or "What was that link that Matt posted last year?".

~~~
rendezvouscp
I think it can be a pain to get at the information at facebook.com and
twitter.com, but both have APIs that make it relatively easy to pull out
information.

I haven’t seen a similar product for Facebook, but Tweet Nest
(<http://pongsocket.com/tweetnest/>) is a step in the right direction for
Twitter. It makes it easy to download browse, and search your tweets on your
own server. Here’s an example (my own tweets):
<http://chasenlehara.com/tweets/> [Note: I have no affiliation with Tweet
Nest, I just really like it!]

~~~
blasdel
Those APIs are only superficially easy, especially in the case of Twitter —
their API is purely based on a hideously broken pagination model that counts
up from the present, and is cut off completely at 3200 tweets for your own
account and 800 for others. It's completely impossible to access anything
older than that through any means!

Nearly everyone makes the fundamental pagination mistake (Blogger being the
sole exception), but calendar-based archives are a basic assumption that
everybody implements. Facebook doesn't expose it in their interface but it's
possible through the API. For Twitter it's completely fucked — the only people
with access to your old tweets are the Library of Congress.

~~~
angusgr
_fundamental pagination mistake_

I imagine there are technical limitations leading to economic reasons for
these kind of mistakes. So much data, sitting in so many massive silos, that
they must design their systems on the basis of peoples' access patterns only
hitting the most recent subset.

That, and the opposite economic reason - that you can charge for the
older/richer/more complete dataset.

(EDIT: I know it's odd that I was whinging about the same thing a few posts
up. I don't really know what the resolution is for that.)

~~~
blasdel
Except that the technical limitations favor correct pagination — it's
perfectly cacheable unlike the idiotic model:
[http://www.dehora.net/journal/2008/07/20/efficient-api-
pagin...](http://www.dehora.net/journal/2008/07/20/efficient-api-paging-count-
down-not-up/)

I think the true reason is really just pervasive ignorance — _everybody_
royally fucks this up and doesn't question it for a second.

If you have _N_ items with _M_ on each page, and the same request for 'page 2'
always returns items _N-M_ through _N-2M_ , with the contents shuffling off
the end as _N_ increases, you're an abject failure. _SELECT … LIMIT M OFFSET
N-(P-1)•M_ is in almost every single web app and totally bullshit. It's
incredibly depressing, but we'll probably be stuck with it for at least the
rest of our lifetimes.

