A mail system that doesn’t have a Bcc function doesn’t belong in the 21st Century.
This reminds me of a comment that we almost always get on HN when Facebook comes up, and its almost always right: it's not for you. If you want Bcc, it's not for you. The millions of people who are younger than you don't think to CC, let alone BCC. They want to communicate, and they want to do it now, and email is just that formal thing Dad uses. That's their terms, and Facebook gives it to them.
The author also discounts Facebook as being some sort of Neo-AOL. It is that, but where AOL faltered was being a completely walled garden. Facebook as a development platform, and, perhaps more importantly, an online identity to all sorts of other sites, makes Facebook use even more in-grained. I would love to see some stats from sites that allow Facebook Connect on how much their user registration went up. Facebook offers a portal, but also a wider identity, and they do it well.
If Facebook isn't for you, then that's that. But it doesn't mean what they're doing is wrong.
The author is well aware that Facebook isn't for him.
> The fact is Facebook isn’t made for someone like me, who once handrolled his own html code and then uploaded it using UNIX commands because he was excited to have his own Web site, and back in 1993 that’s how you did it.
[snip]
> But again, also: Not really for me. I look at Facebook and what I mostly see are a bunch of seemingly arbitrary and annoying functionality choices.
I can see what FB does right - identity and other apis are good, but the site itself has very poor usability, unfortunately. Author's point - that you usually have no idea where your message goes and who can see it - is one thing that makes me limit it's usage to a minimum.
And the very valid observation that FB wall is usually cluttered with senseless status updates and stupid game events from an otherwise intelligent people does not add any points, too.
But surely, seeing how well FB is doing for other people who don't want to learn all that complicated things to post pictures online, I give them credit. Just not 50B of it :)
FB will never become the new Internet, and probably will never even become Internet's identity DB. See interviews with Mark where he tries to reply to a direct question whether or not he understands what kind of responsibility he gets with owning 500mil user records. He has no idea. I foresee a horrendous crash of trust. Hope I'm wrong.
I haven't used Bcc many times but generally Facebook messages seem all phony to me. It doesn't seem to be a real conversation; I don't "own" the messages the same way I do when I use a real email program. Even gmail offers me tools to work with the messages themselves: on Facebook there's very little I can do with the messages. Basically I can just reply or delete the thread: exactly the same options that I have with a status with comments.
Well, it is a problem with FB mail that once you mail a list of people, you can't add someone to the list unless you start a new thread. Normal people do want to do that.
A messaging system isn't for you unless it has bcc? No.
The lack of bcc leads to different usage patterns and can be thought of as a feature itself. It leads to more explicit communication. It means the recipients are exactly the ones who are clearly listed.
More generally, Facebook is bigger than the sum of its parts because of the social behavior that emerges there. Enabling this is what makes Facebook special.
I agree entirely. What Facebook provides is certainly not the only way to accomplish (or access) messaging/photo sharing/whatever. However, despite the limitations of such Facebook services, a large percentage of the population still choose them over other available options with more functionality. Perhaps the extra functionality isn't really that important to the average internet user. Or perhaps the average internet user even prefers the lack of extraneous, seldom used functionality that confuses and distracts them from their core purpose in using such services.
Aye, that comment stuck for me as being absolutely absurd. I'm a coder, nerd, etc, but I use Facebook to organise people/events, and as a simple way of reaching lots of people at once (for events), peruse comical photos etc. I've never used Bcc in my life and just because I like going out and having fun with friends it doesn't make me "stupid".
I honestly hadn't expected this outpouring of vitriol here against John Scalzi, of all people. The things I'm reading here - that he's "just jealous" or what have you - are frankly blowing my mind.
I thought his point was pretty clear: FB is rolling in cash and is the target of the latest 15-minute hype and 50 billion dollars of Goldman-Sachs paper valuation, but isn't really breaking new ground in providing the best possible platform for the Web, and he predicts that this will cause it to fail, like other non-ideal repackaging efforts in the past, because it is limited. And he has some experience in this, because he was an employee of AOL in the day.
And weirdly, here at HNN, of all places, I am witnessing a deluge of rabid Facebook fanboys, many of whom apparently think he's just an old fogie who doesn't understand the new generation. The world never ceases to amaze me.
I think the discussion is divided between two camps:
1) Those who can't imagine the point of a messaging (or indeed, any) system that does not have all the bells and whistles you can imagine or get using another system.
2) Those that realise that most people only use a very small subset of those features, and that everything else is just a potential cause of confusion. So, offering a messaging system that "does a few things, but does them well" will be an attractive proposition for many people.
It seems that these two camps can't see each other's points of view. The author of the article seems to acknowledge 2 but keeps coming back to 1.
"more words are always good, right"
No. Less words to say the same thing are normally much better, the rest is just noise.
I wish I could sign on to the damn thing and not have the first thing I feel be exasperation at the aggressive dimness of it UI and its functionality.
People use Facebook because they see past the "website" and read the content. They communicate with their friends and family. How many non-technical people have you ever heard complain about email apps? They don't because they use email to communicate, not to use an email app.
If the first thing you feel is "exasperation at the aggressive dimness of it UI and its functionality" then you need to find some new people to connect with so that you're actually interested in reading what they have to say.
It is an amazing UI that lets you "see past the website".
I once saw one of those "Missing Manual" books for Facebook on the shelf and laughed. I wouldn't have laughed if it were for Blender or even for Word.
But then I realized: the reason I laughed is that Facebook is so simple to use that only an idiot couldn't figure it out. Nay, even many millions of idiots can figure it out.
For an application that complex, with that many features, that is quite an accolade indeed.
> How many non-technical people have you ever heard complain about email apps
You should pick a better analogy. Every single non-technical person I know has complained about their email app. Usually it's some stupid Outlook/Exchange quirk...
They "read the content" if you can call countless banal status updates "content" then yes. Facebook provides a useful way of sharing pictures, connecting with friends but most importantly for an ever larger number, a place to seek some sort of validation for the pointless minutia of their boring lives.
Just for the record, I was uploading my own website back in '93 too, and I use Facebook and quite enjoy it, for the same reason the author does, because not all my friends were in the same boat.
Calling other people stupid for not building and maintaining their own website strikes as bit elitist, just as saying that people that don't design and build their own houses are lazy. We specialize.
To him it is easy / fun / rewarding to build his own blog, photo sharing, thingamabob. Sure, it has been for me too in the past. But it isn't anymore, especially because Facebook wins on the front of notifying my friends of things of mine they might find interesting.
In short, he is really missing the point, that Facebook has allowed millions upon millions of people to participate on the web in a way they couldn't before. Were they the first to try? No, but they are the first to do so so successfully across such a wide strata of users.
I also find it super ironic that he seems to think highly of Twitter (talk about lack of features!!) while gives Facebook a hard time for missing functionality. At least I can comment on 'status' messages on Facebook without changing my own status. :)
Yes, that line came off as egotistical posturing. We got it.
But I don't like that your snarky quip--which distorts the fact that the author continues to use facebook out of a sense of social obligation, and which I don't think adds much to the discussion--is the most upvoted comment here.
Sure, you can be cynical and mock the guy, but I'd rather see you address his arguments. I'm not so much annoyed that you took the obvious potshot, just disappointed that the rest of HN is currently voting this the most important takeaway from the essay.
Wait, don't people do this anymore? Oh no, am I the last person to handroll html code and upload it using UNIX commands? I just typed "scp" the other day. I should have charged myself admission to an internet museum where I was on display.
I send all my mail through raw, unadulterated, hand-typed SMTP. I compute mime attachments on my TI-85 and type them in on my clicky keyboard. I've taught my parrot to simulate the first 8 seconds of a fax machine handshake, and yet, without facebook, nobody would know!
He's basically saying he has hipster tastes in technology, and while those tastes may not be strictly superior to any others---they're his, and they make him an unhappy consumer on Facebook.
Don't dislike him because he likes vanilla whereas everyone else likes raspberry.
I found his stance to be quite smug but he got his opinions across. I agree with him that it helps the 'normal' people interact with each other without jumping through loops but I think that is more a benefit than a critique.
Facebook is top dog right now, so I get that every highly intelligent hacker out there is going to take their potshots at it. I think everyone needs to take a step back and seriously thank Facebook, Myspace, AOL, etc. Why? Because they got normal people to use the internet. Grandma is now a customer for us hackers thanks to Mark Zuckerberg. We can all remember a time when the internet was our personal nerd playground, and yes it was awesome; but it wasn't very profitable. Now, everyone and their mother is on the internet, and their chosen platform of choice right now is Facebook. Yes, things have been dumbed down, yes privacy isn't what it used to be, but us geeks are now pulling down 6 figure salaries for doing the same stuff we'd be doing for fun in our free time anyways. We can't have our cake and eat it too..
Zuckerberg is in fact not a genius; he’s an ambitious nerd who was in the right place at the right time
So the guy who created Orkut must have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Too bad for him. His Google stock probably only made him a millionaire. Totally uncool.
The author thinks that it was just "PR and faffery", while discounting the actual value of PR and faffery. Never discount these things. MySpace was practically built on it.
As time passes, and the users of the internet get more sophisticated, this wont seem so much like a rant, it'll seem like an opportunity for the next social networking phenomenon. The thing that replaces Facebook wont look much like Facebook. It will need to cater to what today seems like the power user.
Everything is getting more and more simple, isnt that good?
Lots of ranting towards Facebook here of late, I must say.
Facebook is a great way of telling your friends that HTML5 has got a logo, for example. Also, this way your friends that arent on sites like linkedin will get an idea of what you're up to.
I'm sure people who are interested in programming and building webpages will go their own way in the end anyway.
Maybe I misunderstood this article and the previous about Facebook rants, in that case I apologize.
I don't get this Facebook rage every year. Last year it was about the open social graph API and the third-party like buttons. Everyone was mad at Facebook. Calls for boycotts, mainstream press picking it up, Diaspora, etc.
Then it dies down and everybody seems happy about Facebook.
Until a year later, HN is full of hate-posts again. So, if history is to repeat itself, I'd say that the hate will have died down by June and I'll get my hate-blogpost ready for next year, having missed this years Facebook-hating-season
More and more I find that for people I see in real life facebook has become fairly redundant. And facebook has just clarified the reason that I don't see most of my other 'friends' in real life; I'm not really friends with them anymore.
Some time ago, a friend of mine told me that he had a great idea, something like Facebook, but, you know, for the "geeks" and all ze teknischen peepers, blogging, photo sharing, video, everything. At that point, it had simply occurred to me a very simple (and obvious) question: "Well, isn't that exactly the world wide web?"
Facebook is not made for smart people. It's not made for the readers of Hacker News, this guy's blog, or even the throngs on Reddit. It's made for everyone else. I work in a place with some people who will work/have worked minimum wage jobs their whole life (not that there's anything wrong with that). But these same people are on the internet all the time, and you know what they do? Check facebook. Facebook chat. Look through facebook pictures. Maybe browse craigslist for a few minutes looking for a used car or a new job. But 95% of the time? Facebook. I'm not saying this type of person represents the majority of facebook users, but it is this type of internet "familiarity", for lack of a better word, that makes up the majority of facebook users, and the world's population.
I strongly disagree with this. I might read HN and reddit for programming stories all day long but I still find Facebook immensely useful for keeping in contact with friends and contacts. I don't see at all how these things are mutually exclusive.
It's made for people who want to connect to other people. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.
Geeks are just angry because there is now more regular people using the internet than geeks. It's no longer restricted to the elites. As a business idea, it just makes much more sense to target the 80% of society instead of the 20%. (Made up numbers)
I don't use Facebook because I think it's social circle-jerking occupied by a majority of people who are only interested in inflating their own perceived image.
We had a stream of google-sucks/googles-dead kinda articles everyday just before while now. And now, suddenly all the bad attention turns to facebook since about a week.
I mean facebook had the same UI/policies/uglyness since quite some time, why sudden surge of facebook-bashing articles (followed by google)? I wonder how much of the content from above articles was written genuinely and not with alterior motives.
Sounds like he uses Facebook mainly to stay in contact with his friends but hates that Facebook doesn't do everything he needs. Facebook doesn't have to do that and the rest of the internet is still there.
I think it's more that he feels like he has to maintain a presence on facebook because everyone else does. And it galls him because he can't stand facebook.
[+] [-] Lewisham|15 years ago|reply
This reminds me of a comment that we almost always get on HN when Facebook comes up, and its almost always right: it's not for you. If you want Bcc, it's not for you. The millions of people who are younger than you don't think to CC, let alone BCC. They want to communicate, and they want to do it now, and email is just that formal thing Dad uses. That's their terms, and Facebook gives it to them.
The author also discounts Facebook as being some sort of Neo-AOL. It is that, but where AOL faltered was being a completely walled garden. Facebook as a development platform, and, perhaps more importantly, an online identity to all sorts of other sites, makes Facebook use even more in-grained. I would love to see some stats from sites that allow Facebook Connect on how much their user registration went up. Facebook offers a portal, but also a wider identity, and they do it well.
If Facebook isn't for you, then that's that. But it doesn't mean what they're doing is wrong.
[+] [-] thebooktocome|15 years ago|reply
> The fact is Facebook isn’t made for someone like me, who once handrolled his own html code and then uploaded it using UNIX commands because he was excited to have his own Web site, and back in 1993 that’s how you did it.
[snip]
> But again, also: Not really for me. I look at Facebook and what I mostly see are a bunch of seemingly arbitrary and annoying functionality choices.
[+] [-] piramida|15 years ago|reply
And the very valid observation that FB wall is usually cluttered with senseless status updates and stupid game events from an otherwise intelligent people does not add any points, too.
But surely, seeing how well FB is doing for other people who don't want to learn all that complicated things to post pictures online, I give them credit. Just not 50B of it :)
FB will never become the new Internet, and probably will never even become Internet's identity DB. See interviews with Mark where he tries to reply to a direct question whether or not he understands what kind of responsibility he gets with owning 500mil user records. He has no idea. I foresee a horrendous crash of trust. Hope I'm wrong.
[+] [-] yason|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ntoshev|15 years ago|reply
The lack of bcc leads to different usage patterns and can be thought of as a feature itself. It leads to more explicit communication. It means the recipients are exactly the ones who are clearly listed.
More generally, Facebook is bigger than the sum of its parts because of the social behavior that emerges there. Enabling this is what makes Facebook special.
[+] [-] trustfundbaby|15 years ago|reply
reposted for emphasis, because this is the perfect one sentence rebuttal to that entire artic ... sorry ... rant.
[+] [-] theandym|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antihero|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Supermighty|15 years ago|reply
But when my whole family is on facebook, and have stopped checking their email. Then yeah, it is for me too.
[+] [-] Vivtek|15 years ago|reply
I thought his point was pretty clear: FB is rolling in cash and is the target of the latest 15-minute hype and 50 billion dollars of Goldman-Sachs paper valuation, but isn't really breaking new ground in providing the best possible platform for the Web, and he predicts that this will cause it to fail, like other non-ideal repackaging efforts in the past, because it is limited. And he has some experience in this, because he was an employee of AOL in the day.
And weirdly, here at HNN, of all places, I am witnessing a deluge of rabid Facebook fanboys, many of whom apparently think he's just an old fogie who doesn't understand the new generation. The world never ceases to amaze me.
EDIT: more words are always good, right?
[+] [-] al_james|15 years ago|reply
1) Those who can't imagine the point of a messaging (or indeed, any) system that does not have all the bells and whistles you can imagine or get using another system.
2) Those that realise that most people only use a very small subset of those features, and that everything else is just a potential cause of confusion. So, offering a messaging system that "does a few things, but does them well" will be an attractive proposition for many people.
It seems that these two camps can't see each other's points of view. The author of the article seems to acknowledge 2 but keeps coming back to 1.
"more words are always good, right"
No. Less words to say the same thing are normally much better, the rest is just noise.
[+] [-] smackfu|15 years ago|reply
1. Argh, I will finally join Facebook even though I hate it.
2. OMG, I cannot believe that Facebook does something a way that I don't like.
3. Facebook sucks, I am quitting. You should too, obviously.
[+] [-] MJR|15 years ago|reply
People use Facebook because they see past the "website" and read the content. They communicate with their friends and family. How many non-technical people have you ever heard complain about email apps? They don't because they use email to communicate, not to use an email app.
If the first thing you feel is "exasperation at the aggressive dimness of it UI and its functionality" then you need to find some new people to connect with so that you're actually interested in reading what they have to say.
[+] [-] ramanujan|15 years ago|reply
I once saw one of those "Missing Manual" books for Facebook on the shelf and laughed. I wouldn't have laughed if it were for Blender or even for Word.
But then I realized: the reason I laughed is that Facebook is so simple to use that only an idiot couldn't figure it out. Nay, even many millions of idiots can figure it out.
For an application that complex, with that many features, that is quite an accolade indeed.
[+] [-] mbreese|15 years ago|reply
You should pick a better analogy. Every single non-technical person I know has complained about their email app. Usually it's some stupid Outlook/Exchange quirk...
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quattrofan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicpottier|15 years ago|reply
Calling other people stupid for not building and maintaining their own website strikes as bit elitist, just as saying that people that don't design and build their own houses are lazy. We specialize.
To him it is easy / fun / rewarding to build his own blog, photo sharing, thingamabob. Sure, it has been for me too in the past. But it isn't anymore, especially because Facebook wins on the front of notifying my friends of things of mine they might find interesting.
In short, he is really missing the point, that Facebook has allowed millions upon millions of people to participate on the web in a way they couldn't before. Were they the first to try? No, but they are the first to do so so successfully across such a wide strata of users.
I also find it super ironic that he seems to think highly of Twitter (talk about lack of features!!) while gives Facebook a hard time for missing functionality. At least I can comment on 'status' messages on Facebook without changing my own status. :)
[+] [-] paul|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patricklynch|15 years ago|reply
But I don't like that your snarky quip--which distorts the fact that the author continues to use facebook out of a sense of social obligation, and which I don't think adds much to the discussion--is the most upvoted comment here.
Sure, you can be cynical and mock the guy, but I'd rather see you address his arguments. I'm not so much annoyed that you took the obvious potshot, just disappointed that the rest of HN is currently voting this the most important takeaway from the essay.
[+] [-] esmooov|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pak|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] efsavage|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MartinCron|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] copper|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] true_religion|15 years ago|reply
Don't dislike him because he likes vanilla whereas everyone else likes raspberry.
[+] [-] Tichy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] link2009|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juiceandjuice|15 years ago|reply
FNU
[+] [-] japherwocky|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marknutter|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidmathers|15 years ago|reply
So the guy who created Orkut must have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Too bad for him. His Google stock probably only made him a millionaire. Totally uncool.
[+] [-] Lewisham|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitskits|15 years ago|reply
Just my .02
[+] [-] gildur|15 years ago|reply
Lots of ranting towards Facebook here of late, I must say. Facebook is a great way of telling your friends that HTML5 has got a logo, for example. Also, this way your friends that arent on sites like linkedin will get an idea of what you're up to.
I'm sure people who are interested in programming and building webpages will go their own way in the end anyway.
Maybe I misunderstood this article and the previous about Facebook rants, in that case I apologize.
[+] [-] pilif|15 years ago|reply
Then it dies down and everybody seems happy about Facebook.
Until a year later, HN is full of hate-posts again. So, if history is to repeat itself, I'd say that the hate will have died down by June and I'll get my hate-blogpost ready for next year, having missed this years Facebook-hating-season
[+] [-] erik_landerholm|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thingie|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evanreyn|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brown9-2|15 years ago|reply
I strongly disagree with this. I might read HN and reddit for programming stories all day long but I still find Facebook immensely useful for keeping in contact with friends and contacts. I don't see at all how these things are mutually exclusive.
It's made for people who want to connect to other people. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.
[+] [-] jinushaun|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] michael_dorfman|15 years ago|reply
Does Facebook do that? I get recommendations of people I might know, but I don't recall ever being told how many friends I should have.
[+] [-] transition|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhavin|15 years ago|reply
I mean facebook had the same UI/policies/uglyness since quite some time, why sudden surge of facebook-bashing articles (followed by google)? I wonder how much of the content from above articles was written genuinely and not with alterior motives.
[+] [-] jaysonelliot|15 years ago|reply
I did make a cute graphic out of it, if you want it: http://jaysonelliot.com/blog/2009/06/13/what-does-facebook-r...
[+] [-] dcdan|15 years ago|reply
Facebook is incredibly innovative at growing its user base. No other social network has concentrated on and succeeded at this like Facebook.
[+] [-] yason|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsotha|15 years ago|reply