Apple Sucks At Social

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/27/apple-sucks-at-social/

by pitdesi • 15 years ago

15 10 15 years ago

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

makecheck• 15 years ago

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.

shadowfiend2• 15 years ago

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).

phwd• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

rdl2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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?

shadowfiend2• 15 years ago

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.

Apple Sucks At Social

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