About the author: David Rosenberg is the editor of Slate’s Behold blog. He has worked as a photo editor for 15 years and is a tennis junkie. Follow him on Twitter.
I was going to back @yid on his comment, but then I saw the "First batch of app designs are complete"... OMG, this is a complete rip-off.
How can we be sure it was you who designed those mockups? Sorry, but it just seems unbelievably strange that a company like Foursquare would act in this way.
It means people will user Facebook messenger when they are not comfortable with the place they are in.
If I'm at home, at my university or my cousins' I will chose Snapchat over Facebook messenger, because I'll feel free enough that I can talk and goof around with that app, in a way that is not possible with Facebook... yet!
Also, I think there are people less boring than me who will not give a damn and will use Snapchat's Chat everyday, everywhere, and that's going to be awesome. As clichéd as it might sound, they really are changing the way we communicate.
Totally agree about Facebook messenger. This is a game changer. FB messenger is going to be the I'm-on-the-subway-and-don't-know-anyone-so-I-better-not-look-silly kinda app, and that's boring.
I did not enjoy working with it, one of the few times I had to use a Mac to do something. However, I think these new forms of interaction will definitely play an important role in the way we will use (mechanical) interfaces in the future.
Someone recently told me that Facebook had a torrent file that went around the company that people could use to download the entire codebase using a BitTorrent client. Is there any truth in this?
I mean, the same guy that told me this, also said that the codebase size was about 50 times less than the one reported in this slide, so it may all be pure speculation.