But seriously, who didn't think this was going to happen?
"We're so happy to be joining Billion Corp. We feel that they will let us stay independent and stick to our goals. We will continue to provide the same awesome experience you all came to know and love before we sold out."
"We're so happy to be acquiring talent instead of finding it. We will totally not, not make their project theirs instead of ours, depending on our lawyers, and our shareholders. Frankly, we're just glad we didn't have to actually spend time building a good product and hiring people like these folks, since they would've never joined us in the first place."
Snort. Giggle. Boy have I heard that one before. Everyone says that about every acquisition that isn't an acquihire. Hell, a lot of the time they even mean it.
I have yet to see a single acquisition that promised independence and autonomy actually maintain it for an extended period of time (say, multiple years).
That said...is anyone who actually thought about it really that surprised?
They are almost always being deceptive when they make claims of "independence", "nothing will change", etc. The truth is, most companies choose to maximize shareholder value/profits over other ethical constraints because C-level compensation is chained to the shareholder's interests as best as can be managed in most companies.
It would have been nice if Facebook was more like Buffer [e.g. Transparent, Honest], but does anyone ever really seeing a company like Buffer growing to even 5% of Facebook's current Market Cap [150 Billion]?
Deception works at scale. Politics have proved that quite well, unfortunately.
You used to be able to tag locations with foursquare data, that feature was removed in the latest update. I assume facebook places will be replacing them.
Foursquare has well-curated data that's easy for users to edit and update. Duplicates are removed quickly, closed or moved places are updated almost instantly. It's an excellent gamified system for building accurate location data.
Facebook, on the other hand, allows you to attach a freeform place to anything (photo, event, review, whatever). These freeform places are not managed well. In a cursory search for a common park in my city, there were 12 duplicates and 8-10 irrelevant only slightly related places returned. The correct place was at the top, but a duplicate was in the top 10.
It could be an Apple Maps situation. Bad now, but likely will get better as people use it more.
If anything, it'll improve Facebook Places because people will enter more venues, as I'd imagine more people tag locations in instagram than use Facebook's social checkin feature.
As many have said, Facebooks' data is not necessarily very good (especially lots of duplicates).
calinet6 said it best:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743917
I do agree that this move will probably contribute better data to Facebook Places.
I, for one, could not give a crap about foursquare and yet use facebook on a daily basis. I understand foursquare has its community of supporters but I don't think any objective person will argue that foursquare is on a solid trajectory. In that case, it'd make sense to go with a more established player.
Facebook does not. It has a mess of duplicate places and incorrect names due to the nature of their product. Hopefully this will be an impetus for improving their location database, but until then I don't see it being a better experience at all.
A contrarian "What if" question is fun and good to ask, but it's not automatically valid.
Foursquare's data is vastly superior, something I attribute at least partially to the fact that they've built a service that incentivizes checking in, while Facebook is more heavily scrutinized for their questionable privacy practices. It'll be interesting to see if this continues to be the case when 4sq releases Swarm.
However, I think you are quite possibly right. Acting independently does not preclude Instagram from switching to Facebook place information. There are large benefits to using Facebook data over Foursquare not the least of which is better data outside the US. And with Foursquare on perennial death watch and switching directions frequently (including very recently), switching away from it is probably a wise business decision.
