

Facebook Home and Dogfooding - shawndumas
http://daringfireball.net/2013/05/facebook_home_dogfooding

======
sreyaNotfilc
I think this is what's going on with Facebook.

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

~~~
orangethirty
Facebook is becoming a social search engine. Everything will be tied up to the
ability to be able to find anything about anything/anybody.

~~~
johnjlocke
That was the whole point of introducing Open Graph years ago. Their business
model is still advertising, but more narrowly targeted than Google.

I honestly think Facebook has peaked as a social hub. I know more people
abandoning it now than I ever have before.

~~~
auxbuss
Facebook provides trivial value add to the user. Except for those wanting to
view adverts. But there's no exclusivity in advertising, clearly.

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.

------
brown9-2
It doesn't make a lot of sense that people aren't downloading Home because of
missing Android features - most probably wouldn't know there was something
missing until they ran it. The simplest explanation is that people don't
download something they aren't interested in, as Gruber points out.

~~~
goostavos
> The simplest explanation is that people don't download something they aren't
> interested in

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..

~~~
wonderyak
I think the marketing is particularly bad and devoid of messaging because what
else are they going to say?

"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."

------
neebz
I think we as a whole got a bit overboard with the theory "social networking
is the future and whoever controls that, will control the internets"

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.

~~~
emehrkay
You don't think that graph search is innovative?

~~~
uptown
I still haven't been granted access despite signing up right as the beta sign-
up form was available, but no - not really. It's an SQL query with some
natural-language processing used to build the query. Neat? Maybe. Innovative?
I see it as just another view on data that was already available to me through
more-arduous means of searching.

~~~
emehrkay
Oh it isn't public (I don't use Facebook)? I recreated it with Neo4j and
TornadoWeb for a presentation that I gave at a local Python meetup a few
months ago. I found the idea around it very cool and i feel that it has a lot
of potential to change the way we search/think about relationships.

[https://github.com/emehrkay/meetup-
graph/blob/master/slides....](https://github.com/emehrkay/meetup-
graph/blob/master/slides.pdf)

------
dkrich
I think he nailed the issue right here:

 _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."

~~~
johnjlocke
That's a great point. Facebook Home was simply a bad idea. I don't want
Facebook taking over my phone, although I'm sure they would like nothing
better.

------
nchlswu
Isn't this a problem inherent with dogfooding, and not isolated to Facebook?
Building it and using it doesn't mean you want to in the first place.

>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

~~~
MatthewPhillips
> 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?

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.

~~~
npsimons
FWIW, when I did my onsite interview with Google a few years back, I saw a
pretty good mix of Apple and other brands (both laptop and phone wise). Didn't
see a whole lot of tablets, but this was before they really took off. Maybe
some companies are just less draconian and more forward thinking than others?
Any company that told me I couldn't use a certain product or brand, no matter
what it was, wouldn't have me as an employee for long.

~~~
w1ntermute
Apple as a company draws a level of devotion from its users that Google cannot
even come close to matching. There just aren't that many Google fanboys, and
they're not very likely to be working at Apple (many are likely at Google).
But there's no way that all the Apple fanbois could get a job in Cupertino,
there are just so many of them, particularly in the Valley. So there are
plenty of them who end up at Google and continue to use their iPhones, iPads,
and Macs.

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.

~~~
npsimons
_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._

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.

------
mattln
I think this response completely misunderstood the point of the techcrunch
article's mentioning of the iphone. It doesn't mean that Home was inspired by
the iPhone, just that the people developing it could not possibly be using it
on a daily basis (dogfooding) as a test of quality and usability, because they
had iPhones which could not run facebook home. Therefore, the original thesis
seems to be it was bad because it wasn't actually used by the people
developing it, not because it was iPhone-inspired somehow.

------
ChrisLTD
It can't be good for morale that Zuckerberg doesn't even use FB Home.

------
watty
Maybe Mike Matas isn't the target audience of facebook home. Does Mattel CEO
need to play with Barbies?

~~~
artursapek
That's a really bad example, obviously adult males don't with barbies. Maybe
questioning his kids' toy chests would be more appropriate.

------
bluedino
Isn't there a story about Steve using a NeXTstation at Apple for email until
OS X was up and running?

~~~
mamp
Did you use Mac OS 8 & 9? They were awful. No proper multitasking
("cooperative"), no memory protection, crappy TCP stack, and lots more bad
stuff. Things were so bad they bought a replacement OS (NeXT) because their
internal engineering had completely stuffed up. I don't think I could have
gone from NeXT to MacOS 9/8.

------
kstenerud
"It’s always a sign of trouble when you’ve built something you don’t want to
use yourself."

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.

~~~
davidu
This is more true for consumer services, less true on the enterprise. Though
it's a problem that great PMs need to overcome when building enterprise
applications.

------
darkxanthos
I might be in the minority but Facebook Home truly excited me. It got me
thinking about buying my first android instead of another iPhone.

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.

~~~
uptown
"It's too bad AT&T discontinued it as I was just waiting for my contract to
expire."

If you're interested in Facebook Home, you can still get any recent Android
phone and install the app as your device Home screen.

------
smackfu
Is it still only available for download on the flagship devices? That seems
like a pretty limited market.

~~~
k-mcgrady
They added the HTC One and Galaxy S4 last week. Still a limited number of
devices overall.

------
MatthewPhillips
> Does Mike Matas? (Doesn’t look like it, judging by the “via Twitter for
> iPhone” metadata on his recent tweets.) Why not?

Wait, why is he using Twitter at all?

------
johnman
I think this is what's going on with Facebook.

They've had so much success in such little time

