16 ms·

Facebook Home and Dogfooding

62 points by shawndumas 14y ago

kstenerud 14y ago
"It’s always a sign of trouble when you’ve built something you don’t want to use yourself." Not true. More than half the products I've built during my career I would never use myself. The customers loved them, however, and paid me handsomely.
- davidu 14y ago
  This is more true for consumer services, less true on the enterprise. Though it's a problem that great PMs need to overcome when building enterprise applications.
brown9-2 14y ago
It doesn't make a lot of sense that people aren't downloading Home because of missing Android features - most probably wouldn't know there was something missing until they ran it. The simplest explanation is that people don't download something they aren't interested in, as Gruber points out.
- goostavos 14y ago
  > The simplest explanation is that people don't download something they aren't interested in Agree completely. Regardless of whether or not android users would miss their widgets, a big problem is that, just judging from a small local sample of friends and coworkers, no one has any idea just what the point of the app is. Facebook's marketing campaign around this thing is absolutely terrible. From their constant advertising, I've surmised that it's, I don't know, some kind of live updating slideshow of friend's photos? My curiosity is not piqued enough to even bother an install. The marketing of it is really just terrible, which really puts me off. The strategy of "be even more of a non-current-situation-engaging dickhead in social situations with our app!" I don't see a commercial of someone in an art gallery, ignoring the paintings, ignoring the person their with, and generally just being insufferably over connected and think "y'know, I should get that app." May just be getting old though..
  - wonderyak 14y ago
    I think the marketing is particularly bad and devoid of messaging because what else are they going to say? "Download Facebook Home, its an Android home replacement which includes none of the features of the basic Android launchers that you've been using since the day you got your phone. We'll move all of your stuff behind our wall of Facebook so it becomes more difficult to find." I'm sure in a lot of cases it comes down to this: "Wait, if I install this I'll lose my weather widget? Forget it."
  - purplelobster 14y ago
    It's a solution looking for a problem. I see this all the time in big corporations. Facebook probably thought, "We need to make something mobile, so what should that be? How about a home screen? Yeah that sounds OK". Organizations like Facebook don't start with the problem and come up with a solution, but instead think "how could we leverage X?", "what could we do with Y?", "can we exploit this synergy here?". Once they find something that sounds like a plausible thing to build, they keep telling themselves that it's solving a real problem until they themselves believe it.
- k-mcgrady 14y ago
  There are over 1 million people using it so I wouldn't say people aren't interested. I think more people aren't downloading it because of the bad reviews - which are mainly because of the missing features.
  - shawabawa3 14y ago
    > over 1 million people have downloaded it I don't know how many are actually using it, but I would imagine a lot less (10% of that?) Of course if you have a big enough brand and enough advertising people will download it, but no amount of advertising will make people continue using a bad product.
    - RyanMcGreal 14y ago
      Which brings us to: > I think more people aren't downloading it because of the bad reviews - which are mainly because of the missing features.
    - jonursenbach 14y ago
      I thought the whole point of Facebook Home was if you download it, you're automatically using it. If you don't want to use it, you have to uninstall it. There's no having it installed and not using it.
    - speedyrev 14y ago
      Is there a way to get the # of people who uninstalled? That would be as important as the # who installed.
  - johnman 14y ago
    Agree with you
smackfu 14y ago
Is it still only available for download on the flagship devices? That seems like a pretty limited market.
- k-mcgrady 14y ago
  They added the HTC One and Galaxy S4 last week. Still a limited number of devices overall.
ChrisLTD 14y ago
It can't be good for morale that Zuckerberg doesn't even use FB Home.
- nijk 14y ago
  He probably doesn't play Farm ville either, but everyone is happy to cash the checks.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
> Does Mike Matas? (Doesn’t look like it, judging by the “via Twitter for iPhone” metadata on his recent tweets.) Why not? Wait, why is he using Twitter at all?
watty 14y ago
Maybe Mike Matas isn't the target audience of facebook home. Does Mattel CEO need to play with Barbies?
- artursapek 14y ago
  That's a really bad example, obviously adult males don't with barbies. Maybe questioning his kids' toy chests would be more appropriate.
- npsimons 14y ago
  Ever seen "Big"?
neebz 14y ago
I think we as a whole got a bit overboard with the theory "social networking is the future and whoever controls that, will control the internets" Facebook is a very good utility but it's not everything. The social data might be good for advertisers but we have yet to see a single study where people ditched usual advertising streams for it. And there hasn't been a single innovative/exciting feature from Facebook since the News feed. It just seems they are trying to be something which they are not. They are struggling at both ends. Can't create a good enough advertising platform nor improve the product from user perspective.
- emehrkay 14y ago
  You don't think that graph search is innovative?
  - mtgx 14y ago
    Who uses that?
    - emehrkay 14y ago
      Does innovation require usage?
      - CaptainZapp 14y ago
        I'd argue that: yes. Or more precisely: it either requires usage, or, at the very least: it needs to be a stepping stone for further innovation, which, at the end of the day is used.
        emehrkay 14y ago
        I get what you're saying. I like the graph search because it offers regular people a new way to think about data and searching -- a way to think about it in a more natural way. I built an example implementation in python a few months ago: https://github.com/emehrkay/meetup-graph https://github.com/emehrkay/meetup-graph
nchlswu 14y ago
Isn't this a problem inherent with dogfooding, and not isolated to Facebook? Building it and using it doesn't mean you want to in the first place. >It’s always a sign of trouble when you’ve built something you don’t want to use yourself. I'm not convinced that this can be isolated to this alone. I doubt a homescreen alone would make someone want to jump ship from one ecosystem to another >Why does everyone I know who works at Apple carry an iPhone? Every single one? Not because they have to. It’s because they want to. I was under the impression that this is an Apple culture thing? It's alleged that if you wear a competitor's brand on Nike Campus, you'll be politely asked to leave (or forced to buy a new pair of shoes while they burn yours). what is Apple's culture's take on this? >(Doesn’t look like it, judging by the “via Twitter for iPhone” metadata on his recent tweets. I know Twitter clients can still access the data, I'm guessing there's no easy way to do it
- uptown 14y ago
  "I'm guessing there's no easy way to do it" no easy way to do what?
  - nchlswu 14y ago
    oops. access the Metadata (ie. "Sent from _____) from Twitter without a client
- seiji 14y ago
  this is an Apple culture thing? It's not a huge sacrifice to voluntarily use the best product in a category. The number of Apple employees who want to use a non-iphone device is probably less than two percent. At other companies, I imagine it would be like working at a car dealer. You could work at a Nissan dealership but still drive a Prius.
  - unalone 14y ago
    > It's not a huge sacrifice to voluntarily use the best product in a category. The number of Apple employees who want to use a non-iphone device is probably less than two percent. You know, I am a huge Apple fan, but I don't like this argument. It suggests there are no valid reasons to prefer Android or even Windows to iOS, when in fact both Android's and Windows's designs offer a number of features that iOS lacks. While I don't think either come within spitting distance of iOS's build quality, there are plenty of reasons to want to use them anyway. Particularly since Apple is a company which hires plenty of programmers, I imagine there'd be plenty of users who want to use an open-source phone OS. Unless they're all jailbreaking their iPhones, which would be pretty amusing actually.
darkxanthos 14y ago
I might be in the minority but Facebook Home truly excited me. It got me thinking about buying my first android instead of another iPhone. It's too bad AT&T discontinued it as I was just waiting for my contract to expire. So, from my experience, I see this as a lack of Facebook getting outside the building and learning from how reviewers and vocal users want to use it. It's great to try something innovative but you need to foster a community around it so your message is amplified above the chorus of naysayers.
- uptown 14y ago
  "It's too bad AT&T discontinued it as I was just waiting for my contract to expire." If you're interested in Facebook Home, you can still get any recent Android phone and install the app as your device Home screen.
- Splendor 14y ago
  The HTC First being discontinued is a rumor at this point. AT&T hasn't said they're discontinuing it. Source: http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/05/13/htc-first-att-official-comment-on-discontinuation/ http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/05/13/htc-first-att-offici...
bluedino 14y ago
Isn't there a story about Steve using a NeXTstation at Apple for email until OS X was up and running?
- mamp 14y ago
  Did you use Mac OS 8 & 9? They were awful. No proper multitasking ("cooperative"), no memory protection, crappy TCP stack, and lots more bad stuff. Things were so bad they bought a replacement OS (NeXT) because their internal engineering had completely stuffed up. I don't think I could have gone from NeXT to MacOS 9/8.
- jfb 14y ago
  He used a Thinkpad running OpenStep for years.
- crb 14y ago
  He used OPENSTEP on a Thinkpad, including during a Macworld Expo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhhFQ-3w5tE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhhFQ-3w5tE
sreyaNotfilc 14y ago
I think this is what's going on with Facebook. They've had so much success in such little time. The Facebook platform managed to get an IPO and is now scrambling to justify its business model. To please shareholders, and partners, they have to "do something". So...they did. They made a mod that does Facebook without clicking on the Facebook icon. To me, its lame. Then again, I've never created a multi-billion dollar company before. Come to think of it, I've never created a multi-dollar company either. I'm not privy on how to spin a product so that someone is willing to back me with money. Facebook is an interesting company. To me (and I'm sure to most users) Facebook is just a fancy address book. Yes, it has applications running on and against it, but for the most part its a wall of text and pics to view bits of information. As for me, I just don't understand what Facebook home is. I understand what it's trying to accomplish. That part is easy and self explanatory. But, what is it really? From what I've seen so far, its just a way to use Facebook without having to "tap" the Facebook icon to ... use Facebook. That part is very disconcerting to me. Not because, its "Facebook all the time". But, that Facebook really doesn't know what else to do to leverage what its got. It seems like the engineers there are being paid to polish up Facebook over and over again. Sure, it has a new search feature that they can claim to stock holders and business partners that its even easier to pin point the data needed. Other than that, I have no clue what Facebook will become. Now, this is just the views of a man on the outside looking in. Facebook does have problems, but I wouldn't mind having those problems right now. You can say all you want about Mark, but he did create something that most people couldn't. And at a very young age. Many would dream to be in a situation where you have changed the world, made billions and still figure out what you want to be when you grow up. Sorry for the long rant...Wait, no I'm not :p
- seiji 14y ago
  One trick pony syndrome? Know what happens to one trick ponies? They get acquired and made irrelevant by some larger non-benevlent entity.
- orangethirty 14y ago
  Facebook is becoming a social search engine. Everything will be tied up to the ability to be able to find anything about anything/anybody.
johnman 14y ago
I think this is what's going on with Facebook. They've had so much success in such little time
dkrich 14y ago
I think he nailed the issue right here: Facebook Home isn’t an iPhone idea. It’s just a bad idea. Facebook is an app, not a platform. A good home screen interface is one that accommodates any app or service, not just one. Facebook is a service- a single service- that lots of people use. But those people use a lot of other services too. Facebook isn't as important to people as Facebook obviously likes to believe. Lots of people using Facebook != Lots of people using Facebook lots of time, especially on mobile devices whose entire purpose is to provide information in a portable fashion. They make calls, send texts, and sometimes, yes, make status updates and view images. But they also get directions, play music, display weather notifications, and store reminders. Facebook handles a couple of these things fairly well at best. Between the fact that it is a single service and that most people I have to imagine are irked by having a social sharing service in between them and every task they want to accomplish on the device is enough to say "the app is good enough for me."
- johnjlocke 14y ago
  That's a great point. Facebook Home was simply a bad idea. I don't want Facebook taking over my phone, although I'm sure they would like nothing better.
mattln 14y ago
I think this response completely misunderstood the point of the techcrunch article's mentioning of the iphone. It doesn't mean that Home was inspired by the iPhone, just that the people developing it could not possibly be using it on a daily basis (dogfooding) as a test of quality and usability, because they had iPhones which could not run facebook home. Therefore, the original thesis seems to be it was bad because it wasn't actually used by the people developing it, not because it was iPhone-inspired somehow.

62 points by shawndumas 14y ago

"It’s always a sign of trouble when you’ve built something you don’t want to use yourself." Not true. More than half the products I've built during my career I would never use myself. The customers loved them, however, and paid me handsomely.

davidu 14y ago
This is more true for consumer services, less true on the enterprise. Though it's a problem that great PMs need to overcome when building enterprise applications.

brown9-2 14y ago

It doesn't make a lot of sense that people aren't downloading Home because of missing Android features - most probably wouldn't know there was something missing until they ran it. The simplest explanation is that people don't download something they aren't interested in, as Gruber points out.

goostavos 14y ago
> The simplest explanation is that people don't download something they aren't interested in Agree completely. Regardless of whether or not android users would miss their widgets, a big problem is that, just judging from a small local sample of friends and coworkers, no one has any idea just what the point of the app is. Facebook's marketing campaign around this thing is absolutely terrible. From their constant advertising, I've surmised that it's, I don't know, some kind of live updating slideshow of friend's photos? My curiosity is not piqued enough to even bother an install. The marketing of it is really just terrible, which really puts me off. The strategy of "be even more of a non-current-situation-engaging dickhead in social situations with our app!" I don't see a commercial of someone in an art gallery, ignoring the paintings, ignoring the person their with, and generally just being insufferably over connected and think "y'know, I should get that app." May just be getting old though..
- wonderyak 14y ago
  I think the marketing is particularly bad and devoid of messaging because what else are they going to say? "Download Facebook Home, its an Android home replacement which includes none of the features of the basic Android launchers that you've been using since the day you got your phone. We'll move all of your stuff behind our wall of Facebook so it becomes more difficult to find." I'm sure in a lot of cases it comes down to this: "Wait, if I install this I'll lose my weather widget? Forget it."
- purplelobster 14y ago
  It's a solution looking for a problem. I see this all the time in big corporations. Facebook probably thought, "We need to make something mobile, so what should that be? How about a home screen? Yeah that sounds OK". Organizations like Facebook don't start with the problem and come up with a solution, but instead think "how could we leverage X?", "what could we do with Y?", "can we exploit this synergy here?". Once they find something that sounds like a plausible thing to build, they keep telling themselves that it's solving a real problem until they themselves believe it.
k-mcgrady 14y ago
There are over 1 million people using it so I wouldn't say people aren't interested. I think more people aren't downloading it because of the bad reviews - which are mainly because of the missing features.
- shawabawa3 14y ago
  > over 1 million people have downloaded it I don't know how many are actually using it, but I would imagine a lot less (10% of that?) Of course if you have a big enough brand and enough advertising people will download it, but no amount of advertising will make people continue using a bad product.
  - RyanMcGreal 14y ago
    Which brings us to: > I think more people aren't downloading it because of the bad reviews - which are mainly because of the missing features.
  - jonursenbach 14y ago
    I thought the whole point of Facebook Home was if you download it, you're automatically using it. If you don't want to use it, you have to uninstall it. There's no having it installed and not using it.
  - speedyrev 14y ago
    Is there a way to get the # of people who uninstalled? That would be as important as the # who installed.
- johnman 14y ago
  Agree with you

smackfu 14y ago

Is it still only available for download on the flagship devices? That seems like a pretty limited market.

k-mcgrady 14y ago
They added the HTC One and Galaxy S4 last week. Still a limited number of devices overall.

ChrisLTD 14y ago

It can't be good for morale that Zuckerberg doesn't even use FB Home.

nijk 14y ago
He probably doesn't play Farm ville either, but everyone is happy to cash the checks.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago

> Does Mike Matas? (Doesn’t look like it, judging by the “via Twitter for iPhone” metadata on his recent tweets.) Why not? Wait, why is he using Twitter at all?

watty 14y ago

Maybe Mike Matas isn't the target audience of facebook home. Does Mattel CEO need to play with Barbies?

artursapek 14y ago
That's a really bad example, obviously adult males don't with barbies. Maybe questioning his kids' toy chests would be more appropriate.
npsimons 14y ago
Ever seen "Big"?

neebz 14y ago

I think we as a whole got a bit overboard with the theory "social networking is the future and whoever controls that, will control the internets" Facebook is a very good utility but it's not everything. The social data might be good for advertisers but we have yet to see a single study where people ditched usual advertising streams for it. And there hasn't been a single innovative/exciting feature from Facebook since the News feed. It just seems they are trying to be something which they are not. They are struggling at both ends. Can't create a good enough advertising platform nor improve the product from user perspective.

emehrkay 14y ago
You don't think that graph search is innovative?
- mtgx 14y ago
  Who uses that?
  - emehrkay 14y ago
    Does innovation require usage?
    - CaptainZapp 14y ago
      I'd argue that: yes. Or more precisely: it either requires usage, or, at the very least: it needs to be a stepping stone for further innovation, which, at the end of the day is used.
      - emehrkay 14y ago
        I get what you're saying. I like the graph search because it offers regular people a new way to think about data and searching -- a way to think about it in a more natural way. I built an example implementation in python a few months ago: https://github.com/emehrkay/meetup-graph https://github.com/emehrkay/meetup-graph

nchlswu 14y ago

Isn't this a problem inherent with dogfooding, and not isolated to Facebook? Building it and using it doesn't mean you want to in the first place. >It’s always a sign of trouble when you’ve built something you don’t want to use yourself. I'm not convinced that this can be isolated to this alone. I doubt a homescreen alone would make someone want to jump ship from one ecosystem to another >Why does everyone I know who works at Apple carry an iPhone? Every single one? Not because they have to. It’s because they want to. I was under the impression that this is an Apple culture thing? It's alleged that if you wear a competitor's brand on Nike Campus, you'll be politely asked to leave (or forced to buy a new pair of shoes while they burn yours). what is Apple's culture's take on this? >(Doesn’t look like it, judging by the “via Twitter for iPhone” metadata on his recent tweets. I know Twitter clients can still access the data, I'm guessing there's no easy way to do it

uptown 14y ago
"I'm guessing there's no easy way to do it" no easy way to do what?
- nchlswu 14y ago
  oops. access the Metadata (ie. "Sent from _____) from Twitter without a client
seiji 14y ago
this is an Apple culture thing? It's not a huge sacrifice to voluntarily use the best product in a category. The number of Apple employees who want to use a non-iphone device is probably less than two percent. At other companies, I imagine it would be like working at a car dealer. You could work at a Nissan dealership but still drive a Prius.
- unalone 14y ago
  > It's not a huge sacrifice to voluntarily use the best product in a category. The number of Apple employees who want to use a non-iphone device is probably less than two percent. You know, I am a huge Apple fan, but I don't like this argument. It suggests there are no valid reasons to prefer Android or even Windows to iOS, when in fact both Android's and Windows's designs offer a number of features that iOS lacks. While I don't think either come within spitting distance of iOS's build quality, there are plenty of reasons to want to use them anyway. Particularly since Apple is a company which hires plenty of programmers, I imagine there'd be plenty of users who want to use an open-source phone OS. Unless they're all jailbreaking their iPhones, which would be pretty amusing actually.

darkxanthos 14y ago

I might be in the minority but Facebook Home truly excited me. It got me thinking about buying my first android instead of another iPhone. It's too bad AT&T discontinued it as I was just waiting for my contract to expire. So, from my experience, I see this as a lack of Facebook getting outside the building and learning from how reviewers and vocal users want to use it. It's great to try something innovative but you need to foster a community around it so your message is amplified above the chorus of naysayers.

uptown 14y ago
"It's too bad AT&T discontinued it as I was just waiting for my contract to expire." If you're interested in Facebook Home, you can still get any recent Android phone and install the app as your device Home screen.
Splendor 14y ago
The HTC First being discontinued is a rumor at this point. AT&T hasn't said they're discontinuing it. Source: http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/05/13/htc-first-att-official-comment-on-discontinuation/ http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/05/13/htc-first-att-offici...

bluedino 14y ago

Isn't there a story about Steve using a NeXTstation at Apple for email until OS X was up and running?

mamp 14y ago
Did you use Mac OS 8 & 9? They were awful. No proper multitasking ("cooperative"), no memory protection, crappy TCP stack, and lots more bad stuff. Things were so bad they bought a replacement OS (NeXT) because their internal engineering had completely stuffed up. I don't think I could have gone from NeXT to MacOS 9/8.
jfb 14y ago
He used a Thinkpad running OpenStep for years.
crb 14y ago
He used OPENSTEP on a Thinkpad, including during a Macworld Expo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhhFQ-3w5tE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhhFQ-3w5tE

sreyaNotfilc 14y ago

I think this is what's going on with Facebook. They've had so much success in such little time. The Facebook platform managed to get an IPO and is now scrambling to justify its business model. To please shareholders, and partners, they have to "do something". So...they did. They made a mod that does Facebook without clicking on the Facebook icon. To me, its lame. Then again, I've never created a multi-billion dollar company before. Come to think of it, I've never created a multi-dollar company either. I'm not privy on how to spin a product so that someone is willing to back me with money. Facebook is an interesting company. To me (and I'm sure to most users) Facebook is just a fancy address book. Yes, it has applications running on and against it, but for the most part its a wall of text and pics to view bits of information. As for me, I just don't understand what Facebook home is. I understand what it's trying to accomplish. That part is easy and self explanatory. But, what is it really? From what I've seen so far, its just a way to use Facebook without having to "tap" the Facebook icon to ... use Facebook. That part is very disconcerting to me. Not because, its "Facebook all the time". But, that Facebook really doesn't know what else to do to leverage what its got. It seems like the engineers there are being paid to polish up Facebook over and over again. Sure, it has a new search feature that they can claim to stock holders and business partners that its even easier to pin point the data needed. Other than that, I have no clue what Facebook will become. Now, this is just the views of a man on the outside looking in. Facebook does have problems, but I wouldn't mind having those problems right now. You can say all you want about Mark, but he did create something that most people couldn't. And at a very young age. Many would dream to be in a situation where you have changed the world, made billions and still figure out what you want to be when you grow up. Sorry for the long rant...Wait, no I'm not :p

seiji 14y ago
One trick pony syndrome? Know what happens to one trick ponies? They get acquired and made irrelevant by some larger non-benevlent entity.
orangethirty 14y ago
Facebook is becoming a social search engine. Everything will be tied up to the ability to be able to find anything about anything/anybody.

johnman 14y ago

I think this is what's going on with Facebook. They've had so much success in such little time

dkrich 14y ago

I think he nailed the issue right here: Facebook Home isn’t an iPhone idea. It’s just a bad idea. Facebook is an app, not a platform. A good home screen interface is one that accommodates any app or service, not just one. Facebook is a service- a single service- that lots of people use. But those people use a lot of other services too. Facebook isn't as important to people as Facebook obviously likes to believe. Lots of people using Facebook != Lots of people using Facebook lots of time, especially on mobile devices whose entire purpose is to provide information in a portable fashion. They make calls, send texts, and sometimes, yes, make status updates and view images. But they also get directions, play music, display weather notifications, and store reminders. Facebook handles a couple of these things fairly well at best. Between the fact that it is a single service and that most people I have to imagine are irked by having a social sharing service in between them and every task they want to accomplish on the device is enough to say "the app is good enough for me."

johnjlocke 14y ago
That's a great point. Facebook Home was simply a bad idea. I don't want Facebook taking over my phone, although I'm sure they would like nothing better.

mattln 14y ago

I think this response completely misunderstood the point of the techcrunch article's mentioning of the iphone. It doesn't mean that Home was inspired by the iPhone, just that the people developing it could not possibly be using it on a daily basis (dogfooding) as a test of quality and usability, because they had iPhones which could not run facebook home. Therefore, the original thesis seems to be it was bad because it wasn't actually used by the people developing it, not because it was iPhone-inspired somehow.