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I don't have any insights into how Facebook screwed up here, so speculating is dicey. That said, this pattern of BigCorp doing product "B" which is supposed to
by ChuckMcM 8y ago
I don't have any insights into how Facebook screwed up here, so speculating is dicey. That said, this pattern of BigCorp doing product "B" which is supposed to the the same as product "A" which is popular and from someone else, and failing miserably at it. That is a fairly common pattern. I have seen it happen at two separate companies where I worked and in both cases it was an edict from "on high" that there be a competitor product created, but nobody on the management team (and in one case the engineering team) had ever used the competitor's product, or understood why someone would use the product. The result was a product that checked all the same boxes but without any of the execution touches that made the product successful.
I could imagine someone at Facebook said, "Hey, look how much screen time Twitch gets with our users, we should do something to make that Facebook screen time instead. Let's make a Twitch clone, how hard can it be?" And gave it to a development team that had no idea why someone would spend time on Twitch. Google was pretty infamous for doing this (how many IM systems have they built now? 8?)
- icelancer 8y ago> Google was pretty infamous for doing this (how many IM systems have they built now? 8?) Don't get me started. I think my Google Voice / Hangouts account will be deprecated soon, or has been, and will be eliminated, or maybe not. It's not clear. It never is.
- lowercased 8y agoit'll probably be nearly the same thing, renamed, that does an oauth url dance that breaks 40% of the time. it'll have even fewer useful buttons, all hidden until you hover over hidden icons, and those buttons won't do anything the previous hangouts did before. there will likely be a few people that get big bonuses and promotions out of it as well, and they'll write up post-mortems from afar after they've been poached by some new vc-funded darling.
- expathacker 8y agoGoogle voice has been all but deprecated at this point. The form for buying credits has been broken for a year, and calls calls to my google voice number no longer get forwarded to my phone / google hangouts.
- icelancer 8y agoMine still get forwarded just fine. I wonder what fresh hell porting my Google Voice number over to another carrier will be.
- expathacker 8y agoI definitely worry about this, I've had this phone number for almost 20 years now.
- Eridrus 8y agoInterestingly, YouTube gaming is basically an attempt to fight back against Twitch, and I find YouTube streaming works far better than Twitch streaming. I just get far higher quality streams with fewer glitches. Not all edicts from on high are created equal
- throwaway2048 8y agoThe technical streaming aspects work better, unfortunately trying to actually discover who is streaming games you care about is almost completely impossible to the point of absurdity. Its been like this for years now, I don't understand how anyone at youtube can not understand how awful discoverability is for live streaming.
- Eridrus 8y agoNot sure what the issue is? At gaming.youtube.com there is a live tab, where you select the game, on youtube.com/gaming you select the game you care about, then click the live tab.