Lightbox is joining Facebook

http://blog.lightbox.com/post/23107101360/lightbox-is-joining-facebook

by revorad • 14 years ago

61 44 14 years ago

blog.lightbox.com

brink• 14 years ago

Part of me dies when I see a small, innovative application get bought up and shut down by a much larger, more founded business. I want to see good ideas succeed on the internet. I don't want to see great ideas get phased out time after time by larger companies.

joering2• 14 years ago

I am with you! This should be a bulletpoint in a mission statement for every startup:

- if we get a reasonable traction with our userbase (which means you like our product), we promise not to sell to a bigger player, unless they promise not to close the doors within next 2 years.

or something like that...

reddit_clone• 14 years ago

At least they are open sourcing their stuff. So it is not a total wash.

I hope they open it enough for someone else to pick it up.

anon1385• 14 years ago

Nobody is going to invest in startups like that. The startups that get bought and the product shelved, those are the successes for the VCs, incubators and other investors. The startups that steadily build up a product with a decent user-base, eventually making a small profit after several years, these are the failures, and are subsidised by the 'successes'. The big players aren't that interested in buying products: an existing product is just baggage, and one that they are forced to maintain even more so.

nakedrobot2• 14 years ago

Is this a "small, innovative application" or "just another instagram clone" ?

pdubs2• 14 years ago

That's a very...abrupt way to send off your users. If I were a Lightbox user or investor I'd be a bit irked.

taylorbuley• 14 years ago

When I read these I frequently get a "pump and dump" vibe

But what can you expect if you don't pay the company anything?

jerf• 14 years ago

I doubt the investors were caught by surprise...

pdubs2• 14 years ago

Certainly not, but I assume it's not quite the payout they were hoping for.

xpose2000• 14 years ago

Congratulations to the lightbox guys. This is what every start-up aspires to do!

pirateking• 14 years ago

If by "start-up" you mean "sell-out", then yes.

k-mcgrady2• 14 years ago

What's the big deal with selling your business? If they don't see a lot of growth in their future then the best way to make a profit and pay back the investors is to sell. If you start a company with the goal of never selling to a larger company it would be much harder to get investment and you have a much greater chance of failing.

ceejayoz4• 14 years ago

I really, really doubt the folks at Square are sitting around aspiring to being bought and shut down by Facebook.

Domenic_S2• 14 years ago

Money doesn't matter to a payments company? Hmm...

There's always a price.

benatkin• 14 years ago

I think this comment is sarcastic.

CyrusL• 14 years ago

I'm surprised they commented on the company and user data not being purchased. Maybe it's to manage concerns over how Facebook handles privacy.

Also, doesn't this screw investors? I guess if you're hunting for homeruns it doesn't matter if you get a small piece of an acquihire or not.

leoedin• 14 years ago

I think other Facebook acquisitions I've seen recently have had similar comments in their blog posts. It's exceedingly clear that Facebook is doing talent acquisitions and nothing more.

bstpierre• 14 years ago

Are the investors getting money out of these deals, or is FB just recruiting away the talent?

If the investors are getting screwed, I would expect to see new terms on employment agreements in an effort to protect their capital.

scott_s• 14 years ago

I understand that people are disappointed that a service and community they like will no longer be around. But the sense of entitlement I see in the comments on their blog is frustrating - saying "I am disappointed in you" (emphasis mine) is what you say to your children, not a peer who is providing you a service. I translate their reactions to "I am disappointed that you are no longer willing to take the kind of financial and professional risk that I am not willing or able to make."

wavephorm• 14 years ago

Anyone who complains about this obviously never was willing to pay enough for the product/service to make it viable -- THEY are the problem, not the site owner. People need to pay for what they like or what is here today might not be here tomorrow. Way too many people have this expectation that everything on the internet must be free.

maushu• 14 years ago

Hmm, what if the creator makes it free, to start with, with the goal of selling/merging it?

The users might feel used.

endlessvoid94• 14 years ago

if you don't pay for a product, you are the product.

vijayr• 14 years ago

People don't do this in the "offline" world. They have gotten used to the free online services, and seem to think that running websites is not a serious business (unless you are Google or Facebook, and even then - "Google search is free, why is your photo app not free?" kind of thinking). As more and more powerful/useful services are given away for free, surviving on ad dollars, people get used to it more and more. Not saying the masses are right - just that website owners should get more comfortable with charging, right from the beginning.

pestaa2• 14 years ago

In the last hour 14 comments were posted on the article. None of them welcomed the change. Same here. It says something about Facebook.

It is so sad to see so bright engineers producing great software[0] for such a dubious machinery.

[0] https://github.com/facebook/phabricator http://wiki.github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/

koko775• 14 years ago

Evan Priestley (lead on Phabricator) doesn't actually work for Facebook anymore. And he's doing what he like. What's so dubious about that?

pestaa2• 14 years ago

Not sure if we disagree at all. I consider him not working for Facebook a good thing.

Good engineers should not work for bad companies. I know there are good engineers at Facebook, what I'm not sure about is that Facebook itself is good.

welp• 14 years ago

I wonder whether these guys will end up working on increased integration with other acquisitions (e.g., Instagram, assuming that all goes well with the antitrust investigation with the FTC), or potentially even on other other services themselves? I'm looking forward to seeing Facebook's plans with photo sharing -- especially after Facebook's post earlier[1] highlighting the increased prominence of photos in their mobile app.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150978179604009....

unreal37• 14 years ago

The comments on the blog post are interesting.

I have never been in the position of having to decide between a $1 million a year job offer or continuing to provide a free service and struggling to figure out monetization of that living on $5000 a month. Tough choice, and the users are pissed, but its not our choice to make - its theirs. Congrats to them.

k-mcgrady2• 14 years ago

I find the number of negative comments when startups sell (particularly to big companies like Facebook) interesting. It seems a lot of people start tech companies with the goal of 'changing the world'. When they see other startups sell they see them as sell-outs. A lot of people seem to forget - this is business. When you have investors the goal is to make money. If the best chance at doing that is to sell then that is what you should do.

I don't think the rumours that Google tried to buy Digg years ago were ever confirmed. But if Digg did sell they probably would have seen this sort of backlash. They didn't sell and now are gradually fading away - and I've seen them mocked for not selling when they had the chance.

I think it reflects badly on the tech community when they can't celebrate an innovative company being bought by another innovative company.

davycro• 14 years ago

Photos are Facebook's achilles heel. A few of my friends have deleted their FB account, most of them returned a few months later, when I asked why, they said they missed the photos.

Facebooks core design, social networking, restricts them from making a great photo service. I think there is space for an app that provides people with a way to share hiqh quality photos. Not just mobile photos, but photos from SLRs. Like when 10 people go on a ski vacation and want to make a group photo album. Or 4 college students living in a party house want an album where people who attend their parties can upload their photos. An app like Divvyshot.

Divvyshot, Instagram, now Lightbox. Any app that has the slightest potential of disrupting the photo-space is a threat to Facebook. They are smart to buy them out.

joshuahedlund• 14 years ago

There were many potential reasons for Facebook to buy Instagram, and while "buy out potential competitors" was a good one I wondered how much that really had to do with it. I think this new buy-out increases the evidence for that theory, though, and I wonder how that affects the future longevity of social networks. MySpace never had the money to buy out Facebook.

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

> In the coming weeks, we will be open sourcing portions of the code we’ve written for Lightbox and posting them to our Github repository.

Am I the only one who gets super excited like a little girl with this new trend open sourcing if you close your company?

skrish• 14 years ago

I wonder what will be the tipping point when 'companies' stop trusting SAAS companies. I understand this is not a business critical function or anything, but my point is about services that could impact businesses due to talent hiring & subsequent shutdown.

In the purchasing department of enterprise companies, there is usually a questionnaire to assess the business continuity aspect.

Unless companies make an upfront commitment establishing their seriousness to run the business without affecting those using them it is quite hard to build the trust in the long run.

abuzzooz• 14 years ago

Congrats to the Lightbox team.

Admittedly, I never used Lightbox (nor Instagram for that matter), but it seems like Facebook is really terrified of photo-centric startups, and gobbling them up as soon as they show any promise. Why is that?

bgilroy26• 14 years ago

Twitter duplicates a lot of the wall/status part of Facebook, and you'll notice hardly anyone has a social media suite that copies Facebook statuses to Twitter, it's always the other way around.

Nobody really cares about Facebook games. The business pages are there for the users, and the users are there to share photos.

One of the most attractive things about the HN community is that people understand that the big business opportunities are connected to pre-existing human domains of activity transformed.

Facebook has taken the whole activity of bringing a carousel of slides over to your neighbour's house and showing them your trip to Peru and put it under one roof. That is a big deal.

On the other hand, just like Googlers always say, "the competition is only a click away". The strength and ease of use of Facebook also derives from digital photography. Any other website can take advantage of how much easier it is to share digital photos and the future competitor will likely enjoy a similar opportunity to scale up because the departure from Facebook will start as a trickle and grow slowly before tipping over in the same nightmare scenario that Mark Zuckerberg awakes from in a cold sweat every night.

His destiny is controlled by the 100,000,000 users in aggregate. While there's a great deal of inertia in that many people, you can't deny the flexibility of the Web.

corpix• 14 years ago

That bit about Lightbox letting users keep their photos is very interesting. That pretty much kills the photos that were being shared and my guess is few of those will be migrated to fb. So a vibrantly competitive app & community is killed-off to protect their $1b investment in Instagram?

TommyDANGerous• 14 years ago

What isn't joining Facebook these days.

pilom• 14 years ago

So if the users have their data and the app is open-sourced, what prevents someone from starting the app up again (besides the friction to users)?

Lightbox is joining Facebook

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