
Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs - Kaya
http://raysun.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-facebook-badly-needs-steve-jobs.html
======
scorpion032
"Joel Seligstein, a Facebook engineer, is relieved he no longer needs to keep
track of which friends like texts vs. email vs. chat."

Joel seems to wrongly assume that the preference is defined by the person
alone. Whereas more often than not, the medium is defined by the nature of the
message and the sender _is_ the best judge. - It is an opaque abstraction to
not let me choose the medium to deliver in.

~~~
ray_sun
Yes, that is my point. Abstracting away SMS vs. email is an interesting
intellectual exercise, but it doesn't solve any user problems. The sender is
the best judge of what transport to use. It's unfortunate, but it's the way
the world is today.

~~~
bad_user
> _It's unfortunate, but it's the way the world is today._

You're saying it as if it's a bad thing.

Email is asynchronous. IM and SMS are disruptive.

And on IM versus SMS, the sender of a SMS usually doesn't know if the
recipient received the message, while the default behavior of IM is to notify
your contacts list if you're online.

These are different mediums people use for different kinds of communication /
contacts.

But I don't expect Facebook to get this, especially considering their total
disregard of the way people interact with one another. It's a wonder they are
number #1, but I guess the alternatives sucked a lot more.

~~~
v21
"the sender of a SMS usually doesn't know if the recipient received the
message" - is this true? Delivery reports are pretty reliable with SMS. I know
some people use them and some don't but I'd be curious to see the figures.
Email, by contrast, hasn't got any reports that any decent human being would
use. And IM is somewhat different again, in that it broadcasts availability,
as opposed to receipt.

But yes - different methods of communication have different semantics, as
Marshal McLuhan never said. But it is nice to group them, and to be able to
seamlessly transfer between them. No doubt I'd love Google Chat's "This person
is now offline. Click here to send a SMS" if they had any support for anywhere
but the States. And I look forward to the Sense UI concept of crossing the
streams coming to stock Android so I can use it myself.

~~~
bad_user
> _Delivery reports are pretty reliable with SMS_

It depends on the carrier and on the sender ... most people don't get delivery
reports back.

> _Email, by contrast, hasn't got any reports that any decent human being
> would use_

Yes it has, you can embed tracking pixels in it. Not really reliable though.

------
apl
_SMS and email are different. SMS costs $ per message. Email does not. In the
Facebook UI, if you add a SMS user to an email thread, he will receive
numerous SMSes from email users who don't realize that they're racking up his
bill._

Wait a minute, is that true? Do you pay for receiving text messages in the US?
That does seem a little crazy from a European perspective.

~~~
smackfu
Most heavy users of SMS (aka teens) have messaging plans that are either
unlimited or very high numbers, like 1500 per month. Usually $15-20 per month,
which seems high but they generally replace actual phone talking so it works
out.

Also, it's funny that Apple is being brought up in this context. The iPhone
treats SMS messages just like chat messages (using the iChat UI), which is
exactly the "problem" being described in the article of mixing messaging types
carelessly.

~~~
mhlakhani
1500 SMS/month for $20 sounds like daylight robbery to me. Here in Pakistan,
we get about 8000 SMS/month for $1. So it's not unreasonable to think that SMS
would take off really well.

~~~
smackfu
Oh, I agree. Those are the numbers for the iPhone on AT&T in the US, which is
a ripoff and doesn't include any texts in the basic $55 plan.
<http://buyiphone.apple.com/ipa_preauth/content/catalog/att/>

If you are a heavy texter, there are much better plans on other carriers. For
instance, Virgin Mobile has unlimited text and data and 300 minutes for $25 a
month.

------
paul
This argument would be more compelling if Apple Mail weren't so awful.

~~~
gommm
I don't know, I've always liked Apple Mail, simple and to the point. I do use
MailTags though (<http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html>)...

Before that, I used to use Foxmail, then Thunderbird and then Evolution and
none of them have been as good as Apple Mail

~~~
ams6110
I haven't used Apple Mail in at least 5 years. Last time I tried, it was
adequate for one email account (which is probably what 80-90% of users have).
Though it supported more, things always seemed to go weird after a while if
you tried to use that. Maybe it's better now? When I last used it, it pretty
much still seemed to be the NeXT Mail.app ca 1990.

~~~
mikeryan
I've used it for sometime now and it handles multiple accounts just fine. I
run 3 IMAP accounts on it (served from Google Apps) and it handles all of them
fine.

Its my favorite email client by far because of its simplicity in function and
UI. I get some extended functionality from indev's products, in particular
Mail Act-On for quickly sorting mail and Mail Tags. I'd love to see it with
slightly tighter calendar integration but otherwise I love it.

<http://www.indev.ca/>

------
fleitz
If Facebook didn't solve 'real' problems then it wouldn't exist. Apple doesn't
need Zuckerberg and Facebook doesn't need Jobs.

Both companies to a large degree embody their founders and because of that
take wildly different courses of action.

Jobs at Facebook would be a disaster because the company has not been setup in
a Jobs-friendly manner.

Both companies are also wildly successful because they avoid design by
committee. Facebook is about sharing your information with everyone, it's not
the place for privacy nuts. Apple is about delivering the best computing
experience possible, it's not the place for tinkerers.

Jobs heading Facebook would be a platypus, it just doesn't make sense. Jobs
has been on a roll for a while, maybe Messaging is Zuckerberg's Newton. Maybe
it isn't. Calling it on the first day is something I would not do.

------
JunkDNA
This article is really astute. The headline initially scared me off because I
thought it was going to be some kind of Apple/Jobs love fest.

My first reaction when I read about this new Facebook component was that it
would be hard to use without being annoying. The medium of communication
_matters_. For example, you might be forgiven for using txt-speak in an SMS,
but when I get an email written like that, it gives me a negative impression
of the sender.

I'm also trying to get my head around what problem this is actually trying to
solve. It is much the sort of "meta problem" that programmers like to solve.
The devil is in the details though, and usually those fall through the cracks.
Witness all the mostly awful attempts at "write once run anywhere" desktop GUI
implementations.

------
aces
Respectfully I disagree. I think facebook did the right thing by walking away
from email in its current form. I think subjects in messages are no longer
needed and just because there are mismatches between the different systems,
doesnt mean an attempt should be made to unify them.

Just looking at this long term, one can see that facebook will likely try to
push their interface as a standard communications interface to everyone that
you want to reach (business or otherwise) and ultimately let users choose how
they can be contacted. This has far reaching implications for a product trying
to reach their customers. Maybe they will even break this out into a paid
product for businesses to reach their customers, who knows. Theres alot that
can be done with a system like this. And im surprised it took so long for
someone to do it. I believe the market has been begging for something like
this for a while.

~~~
polynomial
> I think subjects in messages are no longer needed

Full stop. While the messaging landscape is definitely changing, the notion
that the subject field is now obsolete seems extremely premature, to say the
least.

------
seldo
An interesting thesis. I can see both sides.

On the one hand, the idea of mixing all these messaging formats together
sounds like it might be a confusing mess -- a Google Wave-level UI disaster.
As he points out, these media have very different usage patterns that may not
turn out to mesh that well.

On the other hand, saying "Facebook should just do a beautiful, elegant
implementation of what everybody else has already done" is a very low-risk
strategy. It doesn't innovate or solve any new problems. As a strategy for an
industry-defining company, this is a route to irrelevance.

So is it better for Facebook to risk failure, or risk being boring? I have to
say they've recovered well from failure in the past (Beacon, early mis-steps
with news feeds), so my vote would be for the gutsy, risky, change-the-game
strategy.

~~~
wvenable
The low-risk strategy is exactly what Apple does; they did a beautiful elegant
implementation of what everybody else had already done. The original iPhone,
outside of being a beautiful implementation of a smartphone, had very few
features compared to the existing competition. Since then, they've been making
fairly low-risk updates to their platform and they're hardly on the route to
irrelevance.

The problem here is that they're creating a wildly complex solution to a non-
problem. It's not a question about being boring -- it's already boring because
only software engineers care about unifying people's inboxes.

~~~
Hari_Seldon
I disagree that Apple have a low-risk strategy, remember the iPod mini? this
thing was wildly successful and yet Apple killed it and replaced it with the
nano. I can't think of another company that would take that kind of risk.

And although it may not seem so today - launching a glass-fronted phone with a
single button, was seen by many to be completely nuts.

~~~
wvenable
Learning that people like small iPods and making an even smaller iPod is not
risky -- that's just common sense.

Touch-screen phones in almost the same configuration as the iPhone existed
years before it's release. There was really nothing nuts about making
improvements to that design. Even if there was no guarantee that the iPhone
would be wildly successful, it was certainly not going to be a total failure.

~~~
ams6110
I don't know, I think the new nano is too small. Apple did a good job with the
UI-on-a-postage-stamp, but the thing is just physically too small to hold and
use with one hand. If the body were a bit longer so you could hold it with
your fingers and use your thumb to navigate, that would be better. IMHO.

~~~
wvenable
Apple does make mistakes -- the buttonless shuffle was universally panned and
now the new one has buttons again. If the new nano is too small, the next nano
will be bigger. But, getting back to the original point, these product changes
are purely evolutionary.

------
bretthellman
People keep saying Zuckerberg/Facebook doesn't know what they're doing. Yet
competitors keep falling and Facebook keeps growing. Maybe things aren't so
obvious?

~~~
ThomPete
Facebook keeps growing because of network effects, not because of all the
great things they do IMHO.

~~~
edanm
Maybe now (and that's a _big_ maybe.) But there were at least several years of
growth during which Facebook could've been "taken down".

Besides, MySpace also had a huge network effect, and lost to Facebook.

~~~
ThomPete
Just because Facebook won over mySpace doesn't mean that they won because they
did great things. They did things differently (and apparently just what was
needed).

But just as people for quite some time accepted the shortcomings of mySpace
until a better alternative came along, people will (and already do) accept the
shortcomings of FaceBook because of it's size.

In other words. FB's introduction of various features and products work
because they are big and because of the networks effects.

Case in point "Like"

"Like" is not by any metrics new or unique. It's just much more powerful when
a company like FB introduces it because of their size. That goes with many
other things they have introduced.

Fmail is just a freaking communication tool.

It's not solving anything new. It's taking advantage of it's ecosystem to
provide something useful and unique, because of size of the network not
because of the actual solution.

And that is fine. Good for FaceBook.

But let's not confuse what is a product of network effect and size with
innovative thinking.

------
ray_sun
in response to bretthellman: Zuckerberg is sharp, and he filled a user need
with the status update / news feed. But now he's hired a bunch of
superhackers, and they are tending to solve superhacker problems. The problem
is that superhacker problems are not the same as real user problems. This is
the difference between Apple & most other tech companies.

------
l0nwlf
"Without a Steve Jobs, Facebook is going to become the new Google. A technical
powerhouse that can't build usable software"

I disagree that. Google have made some usable softwares. Before Gmail came,
webmail was a mess. I guess people remember those popups and irritating ads
from Yahoomail, hotmail etc.

~~~
allenp
Yeah gmail is good, and google maps, and I'm really happy with google docs,
and also I like their Chrome browser ...

~~~
random42
I like search and youtube too.

------
ryanjmo
This post reminds me of the David Platt post on why the iPhone will fail:
[http://suckbusters2.blogspot.com/2007/06/apple-iphone-
debut-...](http://suckbusters2.blogspot.com/2007/06/apple-iphone-debut-to-
flop-product-to.html)

Both articles essentially state that the company (Apple/Facebook) should not
try to innovate, because their implementation will suck and then go on to
mention problems that are rather trivial and will not actually be problems.

Sorry, but I think Facebook is good enough at product design that they can
pull this off. Facebook doesn't need Steve Jobs; Zuckerberg is pretty bad ass
at making products people like and use extensively. If you need evidence you
should look at Facebook, a lot of people REALLY like that service.

------
powera
Facebook has never been good at explaining their products. Remember "Once
every 100 years media changes"? That doesn't mean their products don't work.
I've never had the impression that Facebook was overflowing with incredible
technical challenges (well, they have scaling problems, but the impact there
isn't user-visible), their brilliance has always been on the product side.

That said, first and foremost, Facebook is a contact management app. Allowing
people externally to send messages to a FB account is the next step in
managing contacts. The UI enhancements are unimportant in comparison.

------
Rauchg
This argument would be more compelling if MobileMe / Ping weren't so awful.

~~~
notahacker
My first thought was "maybe Ping needs Mark Zuckerberg"...

------
samratjp
I don't see how this is any different receiving a tweet. You can choose to
receive a text message (SMS) from a particular follower if you wish and that
works great.

Uhh, if you base your SMS arguments from the U.S. outlook alone, you have
clearly missed the point. The rest of the world has adapted to SMS much better
than the U.S (well, the stupid charges here are to blame) and facebook clearly
has a global outlook.

Abstracting the communication medium is actually solving a pain - because you,
the receiver, have decided where you will be available. So, if you decide not
to get a text, you can do that.

Having said all that, I find the whole thing creepy for now facebook will know
not only who you are friends with, who your family is, and who your ex is, but
also where you were last night; but, the zinger is facebook can now gauge your
social signals in real time. That's a scary thought!

~~~
jackvalentine
> Uhh, if you base your SMS arguments from the U.S. outlook alone, you have
> clearly missed the point. The rest of the world has adapted to SMS much
> better than the U.S (well, the stupid charges here are to blame) and
> facebook clearly has a global outlook.

This is very true, I don't know if it is common knowledge inside the US but
the rest of the world doesn't generally pay to recieve messages.

------
cookiecaper
The Jobs hero worship is growing increasingly grating.

------
oceanician
No one needs Steve Jobs? Just a personal sense of focus and increasing
quality, and stepping back from problems to gain some sort of vision once in
awhile. You can't hear people talking if you're head is located at the pit
face next to the drill!

------
monk-e-boy
Everyone I know just uses facebook on their phones. No need for all this
integration, I think SMS is old here in the UK, people still use it, but it's
fading away.

You can get unlimited internet on your phone for an extra fiver, or tenner a
month.

------
erikpukinskis
Facebook and Apple should do a CEO swap. Zuck spends a day at Apple consulting
on whatever Steve wants his input on, and vice versa.

It's foolproof!

------
padmanabhan01
Growing number of people seem to believe they can second guess Steve Jobs.
Well, if it were so easy why aren't they just doing it themselves?

The author basically thinks he is smarter than the guys who founded facebook,
and that they should do something he believes Steve Jobs would have done had
he been with facebook?

------
ray_sun
re: Apple Mail, it just depends on who you ask. If you prefer Gmail, then
Facebook could have mimic'd Gmail UI instead. The point is that unifying the
different transports doesn't solve a real user problem. It's not like people
are having problems sending email or SMSes to each other today.

~~~
pyre
It doesn't solve a user problem per se, but it may make it more convenient to
have a 'one stop shop' for managing all of those things.

Supermarkets carrying things other than groceries (e.g. lightbulbs) didn't
necessarily solve a user problem (i.e. people just went to the hardware store
for light bulbs), but that decision was still a win for supermarkets.

------
B0rG
This is pure genious: James Daly
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html>

------
jmacd
Apple has done Email and it is UGLY. This guy obviously hasn't used .Mac
webmail.

------
ray_sun
Agree w/ wvenable. That's my point.

~~~
michael_dorfman
We have up-arrows for that.

