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It's obvious this is just another Facebook experiment to see if it sticks. To criticize the idea head on is dumb, I'm sure the people who built it have their ow

by gfodor 12y ago

It's obvious this is just another Facebook experiment to see if it sticks. To criticize the idea head on is dumb, I'm sure the people who built it have their own skepticism as well. Probably easy to build and launch, so they did. Criticize their methods (like focusing on photo/video apps in general, or on mass experimentation), not the specifics of experiments themselves if you want to be taken seriously. The least productive use of time is sitting around arguing if you think an idea would work, if it's easy to test.

jvagner 12y ago
Aww, c'mon. You're trying to promote a playfulness here that isn't justifiable in the present situation. How many stupid things can Facebook release before people stop paying attention to anything that Facebook releases? You're also arguing, it seems, that there's now a condition in the app marketplace where people building things have no real understanding of what will play in the marketplace, so developers shouldn't think too hard about whether or not an app idea is a good idea by any criteria, other than "Build it -- you never know what the plebes will go for." That may be how things seem to those of us who weren't lucky enough to build a stupid app and get rich off it, but who's gonna write that business book for McGraw-Hill?
- gfodor 12y ago
  I'm arguing that the depth of consideration should be inversely proportional to the ease with which one can run a test. Certainly the people at Facebook had some intuition about if this new dynamic would be appealing to people. But the reality is the success of these types of apps are hard to predict based upon your own personal preferences, when you look at the way various apps split along demographic lines. This type of app is trivial for Facebook to build at this point, it's really just a matter of opportunity cost for them, so it seems likely they will continue to try various small tweaks to interaction models in order to find successes in this domain. And like I said, you can criticize the idea that they should be building these types of things in the first place. But people saying that this particular incarnation will never work because they don't "get" it haven't been paying attention the last 5 years in the mobile space, and those who lament the fact that all this talent was put into this app are probably overestimating the effort for a company like Facebook to produce something like this at this point.

by gfodor 12y ago

jvagner 12y ago

Aww, c'mon. You're trying to promote a playfulness here that isn't justifiable in the present situation. How many stupid things can Facebook release before people stop paying attention to anything that Facebook releases? You're also arguing, it seems, that there's now a condition in the app marketplace where people building things have no real understanding of what will play in the marketplace, so developers shouldn't think too hard about whether or not an app idea is a good idea by any criteria, other than "Build it -- you never know what the plebes will go for." That may be how things seem to those of us who weren't lucky enough to build a stupid app and get rich off it, but who's gonna write that business book for McGraw-Hill?

gfodor 12y ago
I'm arguing that the depth of consideration should be inversely proportional to the ease with which one can run a test. Certainly the people at Facebook had some intuition about if this new dynamic would be appealing to people. But the reality is the success of these types of apps are hard to predict based upon your own personal preferences, when you look at the way various apps split along demographic lines. This type of app is trivial for Facebook to build at this point, it's really just a matter of opportunity cost for them, so it seems likely they will continue to try various small tweaks to interaction models in order to find successes in this domain. And like I said, you can criticize the idea that they should be building these types of things in the first place. But people saying that this particular incarnation will never work because they don't "get" it haven't been paying attention the last 5 years in the mobile space, and those who lament the fact that all this talent was put into this app are probably overestimating the effort for a company like Facebook to produce something like this at this point.