They seem to go about these things in the wrong way. Take Messenger for example, there was no good reason to remove access to this via a browser on mobile devices. I don't want to have to install an app for something that was previously available in a browser. If you can't provide me with all of the features of messenger in the browser then that's fine. I thought we were meant to be progressing towards a truly open web accessible to all, regardless of device.
This is just another example of Facebook doing whatever they please just because they can. I wonder how long that will last until people start moving away from the platform.
> If you can't provide me with all of the features of messenger in the browser then that's fine.
And I'd also prefer if they don't try and hijack other features.
I had installed Messenger, but had notifications turned off because I don't care to be interrupted every time someone sends me a new message when I'm not actively participating in the chat.
Today, someone tried to call me (as in voice call), via the Messenger app. Because notifications were turned off, I didn't realise they had tried to call even though I had the phone with me at the time because it's treated as a 'data' call via Messenger rather than a real phone call.
Given that I can't separate the functionality of 'text chatting' from 'phone calls' made in Messenger, I've now uninstalled it so friends can't pseudo-call me via Messenger.
Uh, what did you expect? If you turn off notifications to an application of course you won't be notified, regardless of what communication tactics are used in the app.
That seems to be your fault for assuming otherwise. Unless there was specifically a button in the app for turning off notifications only for texts.
I expected Messenger would just handle chat messages (ie a direct replacement for my web-based FB chat). That it also would re-route voice calls was not expected, but I don't blame it for that.
I do blame it that it doesn't give me the option to disable that functionality. I do not want phone calls to be routed via Messenger ever - yet you have no ability to separate that functionality.
Your friend chose to contact you via Facebook Messenger, for whatever reason. It didn't "reroute" anything. Phone calls are phone calls. If they'd actually rung you instead of using Facebook Messenger, your phone would still have rung.
If you use Messenger to call another Messenger user, it will attempt to make the call as a VOIP call using your data. If you don't have Messenger, it routes it as a normal phone call via your telco 'voice' 3G/4G network. Similar to how iMessage works with SMS on iphones (except with iMessage, I can turn it off on my end)
The best thing I did was delete the FB app from my phones and tablets. I access it only from my desktop and a web browser.
Turns out that I don't miss messenger at all. And I get the functionality I want (post a status, read my feed) and none of the battery and privacy sucking "options."
> I wonder how long that will last until people start moving away from the platform.
I think we'll need a solid alternative first. What would people want in the "next Facebook" anyway? Easy contact with every old classmate, friend, and family member? A place for their photos? An easy way to invite anyone to an event? I would wait for that day, but personally my use of FB has majorly changed over the past 10 years on it and now I get more utility out of smaller, more focused services.
I think Facebook is trying to do the Google thing and have a bunch of discrete services under their umbrella, though they don't seem to have a clue how to do that. At least they're smart enough to buy up products that their alienated users will start running to.
The problem isn't that we're missing a "next Facebook". There have been several from both large companies and smaller startups that offer a better Facebook than Facebook in terms of UI, features, etc.
The features are the easy part. The thing that prevents adoption of the next Facebook is that everyone is already on Facebook.
Unlike email, you can't switch your provider or roll your own and still communicate with everyone who's still using AOL or Yahoo or whatever provider you may have used in the past. If you want to communicate with Facebook users, you have to use Facebook. And for a large number of people, Facebook was the one that got them to sign up first.
Techies and early adopters will sign up and try out a new service at the drop of a hat but your 60 year old mom or your local barber or your kid's piano teacher didn't bother with MySpace or Friendster. They only even got into social networking after years of hearing about Facebook and they are unlikely to switch to anything else and learn a new setup.
Even when Facebook changes their UI slightly, these folks are the ones who flip out and complain loudly. They're the people you'd never convince to try out a Google+ or a Diaspora.
It's as if everyone who was on AOL back in the 90's could only switch to a different email and ISP if every one of their contacts switched over as well. Since that won't happen any time soon, Facebook has staying power.
I know the only reason I still check it more than once a month is that it seems to be the only common platform everyone I know is on to some degree. I'm throwing a party? Can't send a Google group calendar invite because not everyone uses Gmail/Gcal. I'm collaborating on a project for an upcoming burn-type festival? Can't do a group Hangout because not everyone in my camp uses Gmail/Hangouts.
So I have to log into Facebook daily while these things are being planned and worked on because that's the only place I can see updates and follow along with progress. It's annoying to use and I won't install Facebook/Messenger/Memories/etc on my phone so I now I have to deal with increasingly incompatible third-party apps like Metal and Tinfoil or the increasingly broken mobile web version when I'm not at the computer.
And a lot if techies are actively recommending the most useless alternative (twitter: everyone shouting to everyone, only very basic features etc) while actively hating the only network that had a chance, google+.
And the reason for the hate: mostly it seems because google in their infinite I-dont-know-what decided to 1. push the hated (but understandable for technicians even at my level) common identity solution under the same name as the new social network 2. destroy reader at the same time and for apparently no good reason.
(Oh, and for those who missed it they since came back with support for using pseudonyms.)
Edit: I hope for something better, for google to create something that connects to g+ and can be self hosted, I hope for them to hold out a hand and make Facebook look bad, I hope for somethong like matrix or hubzilla or something to become common. Oh, and I already use sandstorm.io
[Sliding off topic - going deeper into the Google experience]
Google+, and Google services in general, have become unintuitive and almost hostile to users in the past few years.
I find it difficult to even navigate around in Google+ to get certain things done. Google Docs and stuff - same story - there's not even a sign in button that's visible when one visits the homepage(which I usually go to by typing docs.google.com). You look at some pretty pictures and blurb and then click on something and then get a new tab to open and then you may login.
The days of the Google founders counting the "weight of the homepage" (in number of words for google.com), page load speed and simplicity are long gone from other apps.
I like the Google+ posts layout and font sizes better than Facebook. IMO, Facebook looks like a decade old web application built for IE 6. But getting things done and moving around is a huge pain in Google+. The same is much easier to do in Facebook (this could also partially be because I've used Facebook for longer).
If someone in the Google+ team reads this, I'd love to rant and provide examples if you're willing to consider changes.
I agree with most of that, but why are you keen on G+? It was never open and never amenable to self-hosting or anything like that. It was just a Facebook clone (arguably a little bit different now).
Going further back a year or two, I think Google Wave was going to allow self-hosting. But of course that sank with barely a trace.
It is just the only viable alternative with major commercial backing for now. Twitter could have been but they are too busy painting themselves into the corner.
Old Google at least could be crazy enough to do whatever it takes just to kick Facebook where it hurts. But I'm dreaming.
(Oh and don't underestimate how much I love it just because of all the haters that hang around here :-P)
> while actively hating the only network that had a chance, google+.
Google+ is like Wordpress.com, it's no replacement for Facebook. The fact that is it public BY DEFAULT is a no go for me. Facebook at least allows me to configure what data can and cannot be accessed by my friends,friends of friends ... I'm also a bit sick of giving all my personal datas to Google so i'm not going to use more of their services.
> The fact that is it public BY DEFAULT is a no go for me. Facebook at least allows me to configure what data can and cannot be accessed by my friends,friends of friends ...
Google+ allows this as well. No way I would share my family photos with the Internet.
Also, unlike Facebook, Google+ hasn't (yet) at least gone back and retroactively made private stuff public. (They did however mess upp the buzz launch pretty badly though.)
> I think Facebook is trying to do the Google thing and have a bunch of discrete services under their umbrella, though they don't seem to have a clue how to do that.
I think they're doing fine, by their metric. People are not going to abandon their services anytime soon. Me and other HN users may complain but the rest of the world doesn't care.
They are the dominant player in this market, I simply can't understand why they didn't crewed it already.
I can only speculate: it's because WhatsApp is giving them an always-updated social graph of a billion people right now (including inferred information on people who, like me, didn't install the application but whose numbers are in the contacts books of people who did it) and crossing this information with FB data brings more revenue than anything they can do with WhatsApp itself.
> I thought we were meant to be progressing towards a truly open web accessible to all, regardless of device.
Not at all. It's the other way around actually. I think Silicon Valley, out of sheer pettiness, has betrayed the principles that were supposed to guide the WWW.
A recent TechCrunch article reported that the functionality that you use is going away.
It's a hamfisted move. They abuse these apps to do something -- my wife tried the messenger app and discovered a noticeable loss of battery life. I think she uninstalled it within 24 hours.
I tried the Facebook apps and they were slow, buggy and intrusive. Messaging from the mobile web page was fine...
Message to monetizing corporations - Sorry, all I want is a 4.5" web page downscaled from 21". It's all just CSS, right?
And this is why I signed up to the dream and bought a Mozilla device with Firefox OS; alas the hardware died around the time the OS was orphaned.
I use a handful of apps on my phone regularly and they're mainly for metropolitan services and web pages that refuse to reskin their sites for small screens. Nothing that couldn't be accomplished in HTML5 and with decent coding would probably run better than the current impls.
For me personally, it has gone away. I used to own Moto g ( 1 gb ram version) so there was no way i could afford to have messenger and facebook app installed on my phone. I budged and installed messenger when i bought nexus 6P though.
Thank you for that. I had told everyone to message me on WhatsApp, and resigned to just be ignoring their messages until I was at a computer again. This will help.
> This is just another example of Facebook doing whatever they please just because they can.
Given their claimed user base, their dominance in social networking and social-networking-as-a-platform, and this sort of behaviour ("Use our new app OR WE'LL DELETE YOUR STUFF!") they seem ripe for anti-trust action.
I believe they've already started. None of my real friends are active on FB anymore. My feed is just pages and ads that I never see. Snapchat and whatsapp is the primary means of social life. Facebook seems like Google now: growth by buying startups.
I'm pretty happy with my decision to keep Facebook apps off my phone. I'll check the mobile site once in a while to see the news feed, but that's it.
Of course I have google backing everything up, so maybe that's not much better. Time to write a little script to routinely backup photos from there to my own hard drive.
I personally just clean out my phone onto my computer once every few months and keep it there if I feel the urge to look at it. Once in a while I'll zip up anything I think I haven't backuped up (with generous overlap) and send it over to AWS Glacier. I've got 123 GB of data there and it cost me $0.84 a month. It'll be a bit of a pain to recover if I ever loose my local copies but I don't expect that to happen frequently.
I read the article before I reacted but this is a bad move for a lot of reasons:
* user hostility & just doing this with messenger app.
* messenger app exists as does instagram and whatsapp. You want your own ecosystem, build a phone or an OS
* overplaying their hand. facebook is successful because it is a defacto standard. However, fragmenting new users by expecting them to have 4 apps (whatsapp, instagram, messenger & moments) as well as a website is a lot to ask. especially on a phone thats core function is messeging and photography, they are either launching an OS or they are insane.
Now, I use facebook occasionally out of convenience but I am not a huge fan of it. I recognize I am a fringe & atypical user concerned with privacy & tech consolidation, but threatening teenagers wasn't a great strategy when I was one not that long ago, so the alternative to "if you live under my house, you fol my rules", is to crash with your mates apple, microsoft, google, twitter, snapchat and whatever else exists
thats my point. executing a hostile takeover of soneones phone could end poorly. im sure they calculated this, but i think they could have over estimated their leverage
Okay, so, the obvious question seems to be: if I am an affected user (I'm not, I don't do that Facebook thing personally), then wouldn't uninstalling the app prevent the deletion of photos?
The article is thin on details, does this mean it deletes photos out of your Google Photos and Apple Camera Roll apps? It seems to be written a bit FUDdy, but it is Facebook afterall, they're known to violate the social contract they have with users frequently.
That's nice. What about the millions of non-techies who are about to have their stuff deleted because Facebook decided, on a whim, to railroad them into the Moments app?
Everyone on HN knows not to trust Facebook with anything of of value, but as technical people our collective response to a corporation deleting the stuff of people who don't should not be "I'm okay, I have backups".
>What about the millions of non-techies who are about to have their stuff deleted because Facebook decided, on a whim, to railroad them into the Moments app?
They'll have a great opportunity to learn via experience what we've known for years. This is the only way they learn.
This is just another example of Facebook doing whatever they please just because they can. I wonder how long that will last until people start moving away from the platform.