7 ms·

Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

76 points by Kaya 16y ago

aces 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y ago
This argument would be more compelling if Apple Mail weren't so awful.
- ray_sun 16y 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 16y 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 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
  - ams6110 16y 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.
    - mikeryan 16y ago
      I've used it for sometime now and it handles multiple accounts just fine. I run 3 IMAP accounts on it (served from Google Apps) and it handles all of them fine. Its my favorite email client by far because of its simplicity in function and UI. I get some extended functionality from indev's products, in particular Mail Act-On for quickly sorting mail and Mail Tags. I'd love to see it with slightly tighter calendar integration but otherwise I love it. http://www.indev.ca/ http://www.indev.ca/
- brown9-2 16y ago
ray_sun 16y 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.
- pyre 16y 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.
seldo 16y 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.
- wvenable 16y 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 16y 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.
    - JeremyBanks 16y ago
      I think that sounds rather more significant than it was. The Nano was very much a natural successor to the Mini, I don't think there was any doubt that it would be at least as successful.
powera 16y 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 16y 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.
bretthellman 16y 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?
- ThomPete 16y ago
  Facebook keeps growing because of network effects, not because of all the great things they do IMHO.
  - edanm 16y 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.
    - ThomPete 16y ago
      Just because Facebook won over mySpace doesn't mean that they won because they did great things. They did things differently (and apparently just what was needed). But just as people for quite some time accepted the shortcomings of mySpace until a better alternative came along, people will (and already do) accept the shortcomings of FaceBook because of it's size. In other words. FB's introduction of various features and products work because they are big and because of the networks effects. Case in point "Like" "Like" is not by any metrics new or unique. It's just much more powerful when a company like FB introduces it because of their size. That goes with many other things they have introduced. Fmail is just a freaking communication tool. It's not solving anything new. It's taking advantage of it's ecosystem to provide something useful and unique, because of size of the network not because of the actual solution. And that is fine. Good for FaceBook. But let's not confuse what is a product of network effect and size with innovative thinking.
    - bretthellman 16y ago
      well said
cookiecaper 16y ago
The Jobs hero worship is growing increasingly grating.
ray_sun 16y ago
Agree w/ wvenable. That's my point.
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  We have up-arrows for that.
ray_sun 16y 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.
scorpion032 16y 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_sun 16y 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.
  - scorpion032 16y ago
    Yes. I should have added, I agree with the author. :)
  - bad_user 16y 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.
    - kristiandupont 16y ago
      I agree with the different mediums part of your comment but I fail to see how fb is "disregarding" the way people interact with one another. Clearly, they understand that very well and this is the primary reason for their success?
    - 16y ago
oceanician 16y 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!
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Rauchg 16y ago
This argument would be more compelling if MobileMe / Ping weren't so awful.
- notahacker 16y ago
  My first thought was "maybe Ping needs Mark Zuckerberg"...
erikpukinskis 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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.
    - galactus 16y ago
      Canada is the worst country ever for cell phone users.
- legooolas 16y 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 16y ago
    U.S. Cellular has no charge on inbound messages. That nicety aside, I'm switching away from them.
- smackfu 16y 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.
l0nwlf 16y 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 16y ago
  Yeah gmail is good, and google maps, and I'm really happy with google docs, and also I like their Chrome browser ...
  - random42 16y ago
    I like search and youtube too.
- batiudrami 16y ago
  Graphic and GUI designers like to get antsy with Google because Google refuses to hire them.
JunkDNA 16y 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 16y 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-to-flop-product-to.html 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 16y ago
This is pure genious: James Daly http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html
jmacd 16y ago
Apple has done Email and it is UGLY. This guy obviously hasn't used .Mac webmail.
padmanabhan01 16y 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?

76 points by Kaya 16y ago

aces 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y ago

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

ray_sun 16y 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 16y 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 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
- ams6110 16y 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.
  - mikeryan 16y ago
    I've used it for sometime now and it handles multiple accounts just fine. I run 3 IMAP accounts on it (served from Google Apps) and it handles all of them fine. Its my favorite email client by far because of its simplicity in function and UI. I get some extended functionality from indev's products, in particular Mail Act-On for quickly sorting mail and Mail Tags. I'd love to see it with slightly tighter calendar integration but otherwise I love it. http://www.indev.ca/ http://www.indev.ca/
brown9-2 16y ago

ray_sun 16y 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.

pyre 16y 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.

seldo 16y 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.

wvenable 16y 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 16y 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.
  - JeremyBanks 16y ago
    I think that sounds rather more significant than it was. The Nano was very much a natural successor to the Mini, I don't think there was any doubt that it would be at least as successful.

powera 16y 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 16y 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.

bretthellman 16y 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?

ThomPete 16y ago
Facebook keeps growing because of network effects, not because of all the great things they do IMHO.
- edanm 16y 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.
  - ThomPete 16y ago
    Just because Facebook won over mySpace doesn't mean that they won because they did great things. They did things differently (and apparently just what was needed). But just as people for quite some time accepted the shortcomings of mySpace until a better alternative came along, people will (and already do) accept the shortcomings of FaceBook because of it's size. In other words. FB's introduction of various features and products work because they are big and because of the networks effects. Case in point "Like" "Like" is not by any metrics new or unique. It's just much more powerful when a company like FB introduces it because of their size. That goes with many other things they have introduced. Fmail is just a freaking communication tool. It's not solving anything new. It's taking advantage of it's ecosystem to provide something useful and unique, because of size of the network not because of the actual solution. And that is fine. Good for FaceBook. But let's not confuse what is a product of network effect and size with innovative thinking.
  - bretthellman 16y ago
    well said

cookiecaper 16y ago

The Jobs hero worship is growing increasingly grating.

ray_sun 16y ago

Agree w/ wvenable. That's my point.

michael_dorfman 16y ago
We have up-arrows for that.

ray_sun 16y 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.

scorpion032 16y 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_sun 16y 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.
- scorpion032 16y ago
  Yes. I should have added, I agree with the author. :)
- bad_user 16y 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.
  - kristiandupont 16y ago
    I agree with the different mediums part of your comment but I fail to see how fb is "disregarding" the way people interact with one another. Clearly, they understand that very well and this is the primary reason for their success?
  - 16y ago

oceanician 16y 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!

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Rauchg 16y ago

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

notahacker 16y ago
My first thought was "maybe Ping needs Mark Zuckerberg"...

erikpukinskis 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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.
  - galactus 16y ago
    Canada is the worst country ever for cell phone users.
legooolas 16y 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 16y ago
  U.S. Cellular has no charge on inbound messages. That nicety aside, I'm switching away from them.
smackfu 16y 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.

l0nwlf 16y 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 16y ago
Yeah gmail is good, and google maps, and I'm really happy with google docs, and also I like their Chrome browser ...
- random42 16y ago
  I like search and youtube too.
batiudrami 16y ago
Graphic and GUI designers like to get antsy with Google because Google refuses to hire them.

JunkDNA 16y 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 16y 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-to-flop-product-to.html 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 16y ago

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

jmacd 16y ago

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

padmanabhan01 16y 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?