If anything - if research is to be trusted - all they've done is make a billion people slightly unhappier by manipulating the way people socialize.
If Facebook has done good; show me the data.
So far the data seems to indicate that internet.org is comparable to releasing swarms of burrowing parasites upon the poorest of the world.
One can only hope that a society of successful nerds re-learns the consequence of not being cool.
The thing they should worry about is pushing the envelope too far and too fast. I think for-instance WeChat would have totally destroy Facebook if it weren't for its Chinese-gov't tentacles. It has a much saner privacy model where you only see things from your friends ( not to mention it has a much simpler and nicer interface )
But my imaginary friend used to say: > Imagine the most average people you can imagine. Imagine the most 50%isch people you can imagine. > And then internalize that half of the population is dumber, cares less, is less engaged and thinks less that that dude. > And then, just forget about what you thought and try to make something that you enjoi. Because, people are dicks. > Like those data tracking dicks. Just on a very personal level.
Many people choose to use Facebook, and in fact use it a lot more than almost any other site/application. Who are you to decide for someone else whether Facebook is good or not? Who are you to decide that these people aren't really getting something out of Facebook? Who are you to decide that they're all "manipulated", forced to do something they don't want to?
Seriously, at what point is it considered arrogant to just assume that so many people are "wrong"? 1 billion people choosing to use Facebook sure sounds like a pretty compelling argument that Facebook provides them with at least some value.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+study+manipulating+...
Also, the bulk of my friends on Facebook, by and large, regurgitate garbage 'viral' content I have no interest in.
Links to interesting content for me, are on Twitter, Bandcamp and YC.
The upside is that time is an easy pivot to understand, and if someone close to you posts something and immediately asks you "do you see my post?", it's trivial to answer with confidence.
It would be nice if Facebook exposed controls to allow users to sort their news feed - by time and by whatever other metrics they're currently using.
The point being, any usable social network will have to filter user postings.
More seriously, there is no way to respond to "show me the data". The data for Facebook being a net negative is weak as well. Despite living in the age of big data not everything can be quantified.
(And yes, they're there - you can hear them whining for a month every time Facebook does a significant UI change - a month it takes to get used to it.)
> So far the data seems to indicate that internet.org is comparable to releasing swarms of burrowing parasites upon the poorest of the world.
Haven't a clue what you mean by this analogy.
The analogy is used because the benefit of Facebook as a tool to improve social relations is questionable.
EDIT: For those downvoting, feel free to tell me why you disagree.
I just found myself annoyed by the sheer quantity of non-content, vacuous feel-good stories or images, links to click-bait articles or just outright ignorance and stupidity from people I wouldn't have otherwise suspected that about.
I removed my family and colleagues from my account a very long time ago. It very quickly became clear to me that having anyone like that on there was a grave mistake. Sure enough I was given some tired rants about how I was heartless to have removed them from my list ha ha. That's how seriously some people take this. It's bizarre to me. None of these people need to know anything about what I am doing socially with my friends.
I still have an account but I basically just check it once or twice a week for maybe less than a minute to see if I have any private messages or event invites. A few of my closer friends use Facebook messages as a primary method to organise meetups for board games or drinks and the like.
Since basically cutting down my usage to a few minutes every few days I can't say I've noticed any difference in my social life, but I've definitely noticed a decrease in the amount of inane rubbish my mind has to process from the News Feed.
I have maybe 180 people on the friends list and I'm starting to realise that I could quite happily go the rest of my life without speaking to perhaps 75% of them ever again. I'm not even sure why I accepted their friend requests in the first place. Maybe I was just caufght up in Facebook as a new experience initially.
But true, a lot of friends with the ability to press a button or to select and emoji to communicate is way better.
I realized this not receiving some of my wife updates in my stream!
Today Google ads are everywhere - even in mobile apps and email. And they work with any signal they can get. Facebook Ads on the other hand are now using retargeting ads based on your searches outside of Facebook. Not that any of the two types of ads are inherently more evil than the other in my point of view.
Winklevosses were just a couple of deuchebags with an idea. Go to any Techcrunch/tech party in NYC, and you will meet plenty of them. They go nowhere, because they don't have the hard skills to make something a reality.
Ideas, are cheap. Given some beer, and one hour of time, anybody can come up with a dozen of decent ones. Execution on the other hand is hard. It takes sweat and real work to make something happen.
Also, perhaps, pagerank is viewed as an innovation founded on real technical insight, as opposed to Facebook, which basically recreated MySpace (etc.), initially resegementing the market by serving privileged Ivy kids rather than lower status music fans. That's not the sort of story that people valorize here.
I would also say that in contrast to Facebook Google has used their mountains of cash to try to make meaningful contributions to research (the whole life extension gambit for example).
It also probably has to do how media props Zuckerberg as always trying to change the world vs Brin/Page who seem to lead more quiet personal lives.
Cults always have their most staunch defenders even in the face of shady goings on.
(In a literal sense, by giving out free cool technology, for example.)
He represents a class of extremely misguided super smart rich people who convince themselves they are doing good by getting themselves richer.
I don't think that logic holds any weight.
I wil give him this, he is business ruthless, or has the foresight to know he doesn't know everything? He hires the right people.
When I heard about his desire to make Internet.org a non-profit, I immediately thought it's not going to be in incorporated in California, where you can easily lose control of even a well meaning, selfless nonprofit, if your board members turn on you. I thought I got this guy Wrong. I then though he will go to Deleware--where you can run a nonprofit like a private business. That's the mark I was expecting. I now find out that's Internet.org is not a non-profit? Or, I got it wrong?
Either way internet.org seems like Mark got his wish, and poor people have a dumbed down/spoon fed version of the Internet. An Internet where mark can have complete control? Some of you call that brilliant? I don't. Poor people should have the same advantages we all had in terms of Internet access?
Anyway, he never struck me as a thinker, just driven? I think that rediculious movie about Zuckerburg/Facebook did a lot to further his super smart persona? Would a super smart guy create a social networking site? I actually think his averageness; has worked to his benefit. He thought FB would be cool. It might even get him laid?
Why--because an average guy know's what what an average guy likes?
Personally, I think, if Zukerburg is so intelligent, he will do some damage control on his seemingly selfish/controlling business plans, and dictatorship rules? I know there are certain parts of the country where people seem to be dropping out of FB? I kind of see that trend going on in the Bay Area? Around here, a big cheesy profile pic, and a 1000 friends is not cool anymore. It's just pathetic? Kinda like disco?
Trust me: he is smart and an intense thinker. Facebook didn't get to where it is today by chance.
Coming soon to a VC interview: The s'mores test. Burn it and you're toast.
But the main takeaway seems to be the "very clear" 5-10 year R&D roadmap for Oculus:
> Oculus, then, represents two big bets in one: that VR will be the next major computing platform, supplanting phones the same way that handheld devices usurped desktops—and that human nature won’t change. "If you look at how people spend time on all computing platforms, whether it’s phones or desktops before that, about 40% is spent on some kind of communications and media," Zuckerberg says. "Over the long term, when [Oculus] becomes a more mature platform, I would bet that it’s going to be that same 40% of the time spent doing social interactions and things like that. And that’s what we know. That’s what we can do."
Seems logical that VR is going to be FBs next big play, and their ability to get a good product to market relatively soon will be crucial. It's astounding how much revenue they are still able to pull in from a botspammed, broken advertising model on a product that (from my observations of friends/app store comments) is declining in popularity in the US, one of the most lucrative segments.
[1] "This is not big data," says Bordes, who is wearing a T-shirt depicting a robot boxing a dinosaur. "This is supersmall data."
[2] "I personally called up the guy who’s leading our laser-communications effort, who was working at [NASA’s] Jet Propulsion Laboratory," he recalls. "And he said, ‘What? Why are you calling me?’ And I said, ‘Because we’re connecting the world, and I want you to come in and meet the team, and this is something that’s really important to me, and I think we can make a big difference.’ " Even in the retelling, Zuckerberg makes it sound urgent.
[3] Yael Maguire director, Connectivity Lab: "Our focus is technologies that can advance the state of the art by at least an order of magnitude. We don’t want to make something better by a factor of two or three, because the rest of the industry is going to do that."
Where are the synergies? Display ads within VR? From the reaction of visceral disgust I've seen to ads on the apple watch, I can't see anyone putting up with them in the Oculus.
Maybe they're keeping something Insanely Great up their sleeve, but from their total failure to do anything at all with whatsapp or instagram, I'm not hopeful.
It would be easy to make the best ads ever through VR. Sprinkle some coke bottles and billboards into whatever first generation games come out for Oculus. For immersion's sake, of course. Create a Coke Cafe where you can talk to your friends in a virtual environment for free. The best part? You don't have to pay for physical objects or real estate. Create a few models, pay the dev studio/Facebook, and you're done.
Rather than being constrained by a screen (TV, computer, Apple Watch), VR ads could have so much room for creativity given a fully immersive and completely absorbing experience. And, just like Facebook and Snapchat have done to drive user growth, if we stay ahead of the adoption curve we probably won't see them until the tech is boring anyways.
There's a fine line between great ads, games, movies, shows, etc. - they're all different forms of entertainment w/ different agendas and different reasons for existing, but if they entertain, that's all that matters at the end of the day.
Innovation has come from the ground up with companies like Instagram - which facebook has purchased - but what has purchasing innovation done for facebook? Seems like people don't want to be at Mark's party so he went and bought the building the next party was in..
I see purchasing Oculus to try to 'own' VR kind of like buying AOL in '98 to try to own the internet.
I feel like this is taking a technology and trying to see what features you can provide rather than asking what features you need and then finding the technology necessary to provide them..
What was the date for Genisys to launch again? Some time in October 2017?
