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 don't really think your snarky attitude is adding to the discussion, but, more than that, it's not even correct. The vast majority of replies here are decidedly anti facebook, and the ones that arent tend to be luke warm at best. Additionally, if you look at the front page over the last couple days, he popular facebook related articles have been very anti facebook.
I'm not trying to make any claims about face book's virtue (as a future facebook engineer, I doubt I would have much credibility anyway), but it is unfair to be so dismissive about people who might argue that it isn't completely awful, when they certainly aren't just part of hn groupthink (as you seem to have suggested.)
Fine, ill add some detail to my snarky comment. There is so much going on in the valley and in tech right now that frankly has all happened before. Given the market conditions now are far more ripe for all these services, which allows them to be made and more successful now.
The problem I see, and the point of my comment is that we truly aren't seeing too much that is new - but when a company comes along that is hyper successful and full of young talented engineers - people forget history.
That is fine - but I think people need to take a step back sometimes.
Point taken, however. (I'll take my own advice about taking a step back :) )
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?