
Apple Sucks At Social - pitdesi
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/27/apple-sucks-at-social/
======
rdl
Apple sucks at providing online services in general. Their strength is in
making physical products and writing software for those products (at the OS
level, and sometimes apps).

MobileMe was an utter fiasco, and IMO iCloud is one of the shakiest rollouts
Apple has done to date. The iTunes Store does ok, but not great, either.

~~~
natesm
I'm still not entirely sure _what iCloud actually is_. It syncs
~/Library/Preferences? And it lets you redownload music? And I can remotely
wipe my laptop I guess?

But, what is the actual service here? I switched in on in System Preferences
and it didn't really tell me anything, nor did I notice anything changing.

I do only have one Mac and zero iPhones though, so maybe it would be more
obvious if I had more devices?

~~~
shadowfiend
Yes, it isn't useful if you only have one device. It is mostly a sync service.
So it transparently synchronizes: \- iWork documents \- Contacts \- Calendar
\- Music \- Photos (the most recent 1000, I believe) \- A few other things
(don't recall everything)

A few things worth mentioning: \- Other app data can be synchronized if those
apps make use of the newer Lion/iOS 5 APIs. I don't know if anyone does that
yet. \- Music is “synced” by re-downloading from the iTunes Store. You can
sync non-iTMS music using iTunes Match, which will upload any music it fails
to match with an equivalent song in the iTunes Store. This means you do not
use iCloud storage space for songs that are on iTMS.

These things are synced between iPhones, iPads, and Macs, with some support
for the Apple TV (specifically, Photo Stream is also on the Apple TV).

In addition, yes, you do have find my mac and find my iPhone as part of it,
and there are web apps for your calendar and contacts.

~~~
rdl
Yeah, my problem with it is that no third-party apps make use of the APIs yet.
I'd like 1Password using iCloud for sync, etc. (I have multiple OSX machines,
an iOS iPhone 4, and an iOS iPad 1). Right now, dropbox API is the best
alternative.

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phwd
Social networking (where I make the generalization within Google Plus,
Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook) is saturated. I don't want to invite my friend
to not-another-social-network. What is needed is refinements.

Apple being bad at social is okay with me.

~~~
2arrs2ells
Apple needs to stop trying to build it's own separate social graph for each
features (Game Center, Find My Friends, Ping, maybe even Facetime) and give
Zuckerberg whatever it takes to integrate with Facebook for friend discovery
like everyone else is (i.e. Foursquare, Instagram).

I wish I could see what kinds of games my friends are playing, but the mental
stress of thinking through who I know has an iPhone, and manually searching
for them just makes it not worthwhile.

~~~
jacobbijani
Aren't all of Apple's social graphs tied to an iTunes login? At least they are
consolidating them across their own network. But, I guess since I can't
FaceTime my Game Center friends, that's not very useful...

Also, yes, I don't really care if Apple does social as I wouldn't want to
invest in another network either. It seems though they are trying at it and
failing, rather than just ignoring it.

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makecheck
They didn't need Find My Friends, all they needed was a dead-simple way to
send a description of the phone's current location as a text message or
iMessage. Then you can just ask somebody his or her location, and if that
person wants to respond it's possible with one tap of a finger.

~~~
shadowfiend
You can already do this fairly easily—find your current location in the maps
app, tap on it, and “share location”. Sharing via message is one option.

Find My Friends is more of a passive thing. e.g., there are people coming to
my party, let's ask them to let me access their location so I know when I need
to start panicking (not the best example, I know :p).

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SeveredCross
The list of people who didn't already know this is very, very short.

