This is just another example of Facebook doing whatever they please just because they can. I wonder how long that will last until people start moving away from the platform.
And I'd also prefer if they don't try and hijack other features.
I had installed Messenger, but had notifications turned off because I don't care to be interrupted every time someone sends me a new message when I'm not actively participating in the chat.
Today, someone tried to call me (as in voice call), via the Messenger app. Because notifications were turned off, I didn't realise they had tried to call even though I had the phone with me at the time because it's treated as a 'data' call via Messenger rather than a real phone call.
Given that I can't separate the functionality of 'text chatting' from 'phone calls' made in Messenger, I've now uninstalled it so friends can't pseudo-call me via Messenger.
That seems to be your fault for assuming otherwise. Unless there was specifically a button in the app for turning off notifications only for texts.
Actually I feel quite better
I think we'll need a solid alternative first. What would people want in the "next Facebook" anyway? Easy contact with every old classmate, friend, and family member? A place for their photos? An easy way to invite anyone to an event? I would wait for that day, but personally my use of FB has majorly changed over the past 10 years on it and now I get more utility out of smaller, more focused services.
I think Facebook is trying to do the Google thing and have a bunch of discrete services under their umbrella, though they don't seem to have a clue how to do that. At least they're smart enough to buy up products that their alienated users will start running to.
The features are the easy part. The thing that prevents adoption of the next Facebook is that everyone is already on Facebook.
Unlike email, you can't switch your provider or roll your own and still communicate with everyone who's still using AOL or Yahoo or whatever provider you may have used in the past. If you want to communicate with Facebook users, you have to use Facebook. And for a large number of people, Facebook was the one that got them to sign up first.
Techies and early adopters will sign up and try out a new service at the drop of a hat but your 60 year old mom or your local barber or your kid's piano teacher didn't bother with MySpace or Friendster. They only even got into social networking after years of hearing about Facebook and they are unlikely to switch to anything else and learn a new setup.
Even when Facebook changes their UI slightly, these folks are the ones who flip out and complain loudly. They're the people you'd never convince to try out a Google+ or a Diaspora.
It's as if everyone who was on AOL back in the 90's could only switch to a different email and ISP if every one of their contacts switched over as well. Since that won't happen any time soon, Facebook has staying power.
I know the only reason I still check it more than once a month is that it seems to be the only common platform everyone I know is on to some degree. I'm throwing a party? Can't send a Google group calendar invite because not everyone uses Gmail/Gcal. I'm collaborating on a project for an upcoming burn-type festival? Can't do a group Hangout because not everyone in my camp uses Gmail/Hangouts.
So I have to log into Facebook daily while these things are being planned and worked on because that's the only place I can see updates and follow along with progress. It's annoying to use and I won't install Facebook/Messenger/Memories/etc on my phone so I now I have to deal with increasingly incompatible third-party apps like Metal and Tinfoil or the increasingly broken mobile web version when I'm not at the computer.
I think they're doing fine, by their metric. People are not going to abandon their services anytime soon. Me and other HN users may complain but the rest of the world doesn't care.
Not at all. It's the other way around actually. I think Silicon Valley, out of sheer pettiness, has betrayed the principles that were supposed to guide the WWW.
It's a hamfisted move. They abuse these apps to do something -- my wife tried the messenger app and discovered a noticeable loss of battery life. I think she uninstalled it within 24 hours.
I have some bad news for you...
Given their claimed user base, their dominance in social networking and social-networking-as-a-platform, and this sort of behaviour ("Use our new app OR WE'LL DELETE YOUR STUFF!") they seem ripe for anti-trust action.
I use Firefox so I can just his "pretend to be a desktop browser" and respond to messages.
Of course I have google backing everything up, so maybe that's not much better. Time to write a little script to routinely backup photos from there to my own hard drive.
* user hostility & just doing this with messenger app.
* messenger app exists as does instagram and whatsapp. You want your own ecosystem, build a phone or an OS
* overplaying their hand. facebook is successful because it is a defacto standard. However, fragmenting new users by expecting them to have 4 apps (whatsapp, instagram, messenger & moments) as well as a website is a lot to ask. especially on a phone thats core function is messeging and photography, they are either launching an OS or they are insane.
Now, I use facebook occasionally out of convenience but I am not a huge fan of it. I recognize I am a fringe & atypical user concerned with privacy & tech consolidation, but threatening teenagers wasn't a great strategy when I was one not that long ago, so the alternative to "if you live under my house, you fol my rules", is to crash with your mates apple, microsoft, google, twitter, snapchat and whatever else exists
The article is thin on details, does this mean it deletes photos out of your Google Photos and Apple Camera Roll apps? It seems to be written a bit FUDdy, but it is Facebook afterall, they're known to violate the social contract they have with users frequently.
Most users have no reason whatsoever to worry.
Everyone on HN knows not to trust Facebook with anything of of value, but as technical people our collective response to a corporation deleting the stuff of people who don't should not be "I'm okay, I have backups".
They'll have a great opportunity to learn via experience what we've known for years. This is the only way they learn.
There's no way I'm going to install this app. I never installed the Facebook app because of repeated articles about what a battery killer it was.
I installed Google Photos on my iPhone because it provided me with some features I couldn't get otherwise.
