Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

http://raysun.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-facebook-badly-needs-steve-jobs.html

by Kaya • 16 years ago

76 71 16 years ago

raysun.blogspot.com

aces• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

> 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.

samratjp• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

> 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.

paul• 16 years ago

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

ray_sun5• 16 years ago

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.

gommm• 16 years ago

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

ams61102• 16 years ago

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.

brown9-2• 16 years ago

It'd also be more compelling if this Facebook service was released yet and if anyone commenting on it actually had a chance to use it.

ray_sun5• 16 years ago

pyre• 16 years ago

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.

seldo2• 16 years ago

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.

wvenable5• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

liuliu• 16 years ago

The original iPhone did have a niche, more than just did a beautiful elegant implementation. The touchscreen prior to iPhone sucks, and no body used the multi-touch screen yet. With your analogy, iPhone created a rather complex solution (in implementation perspective) to a non-problem (they can use keyboard, touchscreen is a non-problem!). It feels to me to be ignorant to say what original iPhone have done is what everybody else had already done.

Dbug2• 16 years ago

Apple has been far from low risk. Their ditching the floppy, changing ports, switching processor families (more than once), all those iMac form-factors, moving to LCD while they were still quite costly, replacing the operating system... are all examples of them being willing to make major transitions to move forward. Some say dumping Flash is risky. There was risk getting into phones, a market that already had many very well established players, and starting with a product that cost MORE than what was out there. It's kinda funny how now people act like Apple had some early entry advantage. Apple took a risk offering a tablet that DID NOT have binary compatibility with their desktops.

After the 9/11 attacks, Apple was still working hard on development while others cut back. Many thought Apple was crazy to build fancy retail stores at very costly locations. Many said that targeting the high-end of the market was doomed to fail in a weak economy, but Apple kept expanding.

Maybe the choices Apple has made just don't seem so risky after seeing them being so wildly successful? The Gateway stores are long gone. I haven't seen details of the revenue per square foot at Microsoft stores.

powera• 16 years ago

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.

fleitz• 16 years ago

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.

bretthellman2• 16 years ago

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?

ThomPete2• 16 years ago

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

edanm• 16 years ago

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.

cookiecaper• 16 years ago

The Jobs hero worship is growing increasingly grating.

ray_sun5• 16 years ago

Agree w/ wvenable. That's my point.

michael_dorfman• 16 years ago

We have up-arrows for that.

ray_sun5• 16 years ago

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.

scorpion0322• 16 years ago

"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_sun5• 16 years ago

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.

scorpion0322• 16 years ago

Yes. I should have added, I agree with the author. :)

bad_user2• 16 years ago

> 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.

oceanician• 16 years ago

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!

Rauchg• 16 years ago

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

notahacker• 16 years ago

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

erikpukinskis• 16 years ago

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!

monk-e-boy• 16 years ago

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.

apl• 16 years ago

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.

Maro• 16 years ago

Perhaps he meant that the users who are sending the message [to the "email list" with an SMS number on it] will pay.

mgrouchy• 16 years ago

I dunno, I'm in canada before I got my unlimited txt plan, its 15c per txt to receive and 15c per txt to send. Its highway robbery.

legooolas• 16 years ago

Many US mobile/cell plans include paying for receiving text messages.

Clearly no-one in the US gets any text message spam, or they'd be _really_ angry about paying to receive that.

sudont• 16 years ago

U.S. Cellular has no charge on inbound messages. That nicety aside, I'm switching away from them.

smackfu2• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

jokermatt999• 16 years ago

Just to add, Android phones have the same issue with SMS/Google talk interfaces being the same. Luckily I have an unlimited plan though.

brownleej• 16 years ago

SMS and iChat may have the same interface, but they are not mixed in a single client. In fact, Apple does not provide an IM client. The central complaint in this article is that the same message was being communicated over email and SMS, without the sender being able to distinguish between the two in any way. I did not read this article as complaining that the interfaces for SMS and email were too similar; I read it is complaining that they were in the same client. The only complaint about the interface I saw was that it grouped all messages together, independent of the subject.

[Edited to clarify which part of the parent I was responding to]

JoeCortopassi2• 16 years ago

Technically you can get some nominal charge per text, but most people have an 'unlimited texts' plan. It's like buying a phone and not having minutes now days

JoeCortopassi2• 16 years ago

Seriously? Get downvoted for this?

jakevoytko• 16 years ago

It's absolutely true - foregoing a texting plan in the US saves a few dollars every month. This is popular enough that it's impolite to assume that all recipients will appreciate text messages.

When I signed an agreement in college, I texted so infrequently that I saved money by paying for individual messages. Now that I can afford it, I still pay per message as an excuse - I can ask people to call or email without sounding rude.

seldo2• 16 years ago

European carriers charge each other to receive SMS as well, they just don't customarily pass it on to the consumer. The mobile network "Three" used to have a program where they'd pass on the money received to consumers, and it became a scam, popular in Italy, to send yourself hundreds of SMS (from "free SMS" websites) to get free money.

l0nwlf• 16 years ago

"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• 16 years ago

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

random42• 16 years ago

I like search and youtube too.

batiudrami• 16 years ago

Graphic and GUI designers like to get antsy with Google because Google refuses to hire them.

JunkDNA• 16 years ago

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.

ryanjmo• 16 years ago

This post reminds me of the David Platt post on why the iPhone will fail: http://suckbusters2.blogspot.com/2007/06/apple-iphone-debut-...

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.

B0rG• 16 years ago

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

jmacd• 16 years ago

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

padmanabhan01• 16 years ago

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?

Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

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