Facebook has failed us
industryinteractive.netI would argue that Facebook has not failed us in the way this article asserts: namely with the poor quality of it's peripheral tools, but instead the failure is simply one of feature bloat. Really, I use Facebook to keep up with what my friends are doing in the REAL world. Facebook is making the mistake of adding features that don't help make that easier, and in fact in a lot of cases make it harder and downright annoying.
I'm in the exact same boat as the author - I don't actively use Facebook for any of my online activity, but I depend upon the Facebook apps and so on (like the Flickr importer I wrote at http://www.feedmyface.net/) so that my less tech-savvy friends who only use Facebook are kept informed of what I'm up to
Increasingly I wish my friends would move to a more open service like Friendfeed that is good about playing nice with others and exporting data feeds to the outside world.
Unfortunately, Facebook is the local maxima that most of my friends are stuck at. And I neither see that changing, nor Facebook becoming more open any time soon.
this is a good example of trying to do too many things at once. You continue improving your core while SLOWLY branching out and adding more features. Facebook has rushed and wound up with a bunch of half-assed implementation. Trying to be everything to everyone won't work.
This is ridiculous. For the vast majority of users Facebook has been a resounding success. It may 'fail' some people but there is a reason why it has tens of millions of active users. You can't please all the people all the time and nor should you try.
I didn't say that Facebook has failed, I said Facebook has failed us. There's a huge difference between the two statements.
I would imagine that the average reader of Hacker News uses a few web apps already. The point of my article was that Facebook doesn't play well with anyone else. They do an amazing job at their core function, connecting people, but they should give it a rest with all of these half-assed implementations of existing functions and focus their efforts instead on making it easier to integrate with Facebook.
OK. I agree that Facebook doesn't play well with anyone else. Not meaning to be contentious but I'm not sure if this can be classed as a failing us.
I have to strongly disagree that their implementations of existing functions are half-assed. I, and many people I know, communicate more with Facebook's messaging service than email service.
I would also argue that the user experience is considerably better than performing the same communications via email clients such as Gmail. Their photo sharing service is also highly adequate for my and other's needs. I have never considered creating a Flickr account because on the whole I think the centralization of features by Facebook outweighs any benefits provided by additional features in Flickr.
Perhaps you view these Facebook features as superfluous however for me they are the reason I use Facebook so much. I deliberately decide to message my friends using Facebook instead of email. I deliberately log in to Facebook to see if any of my friends have posted any new photos. The supposedly core features of Facebook like the profile and the wall are things that I rarely use.
I have a feeling that we may be 'violently' agreeing with each other.