This partnership replaces our existing forums, which, while worked effectively at the beginning of Platform, have begun to show their age. We spent many months looking at the right long-term solution and decided that a partnership with one of the best technical Q&A sites on the Web was the best approach for our community.
Good move.
Matt Drance:
Facebook’s moves suggest it wants to succeed here. It’s gobbling up a remarkable amount of talent — an All-Star Team, if you will. The problem with all-star rosters, of course, is that as a team they often suck. It’s an odd phenomenon, but if you put too much greatness in the same room, things don’t always turn out so… great. Each all-star may be too used to his or her way of doing things, and while all the team members might respect each other, they don’t necessarily flow together very well. They don’t communicate properly. They don’t share the ball. They just don’t work as a team.
Very thoughtful piece. This works for other industries as well, soccer for example: Real Madrid & Manchester City have been on a spending spree. Trying to buy the trophies by buying the best players around. And neither of the two has had any real success in surpassing their respective rivals, Barcelona & Manchester United. You can certainly buy talent but you can’t buy a team.
Adding a talented player to your team could work out great. Changing 9 players out of your 11 people line-up is however more likely to disrupt the team then to improve it. At least for the near term. It will be interesting to see how things work out for Facebook.
“He pointed out Apple’s headquarters, then Hewlett-Packard and a number of other big tech companies,” the individual explained. “Then he pointed to Facebook and said that it would eventually be bigger than all of the companies he had just mentioned, and that if I joined the company, I could be a part of it all.”
The Graph API explorer makes it easy to get started with the Graph API and test the API as you program against it and build your app.
Finally an official Facebook Graph API Explorer.
Google+ is Google’s latest attempt at putting Facebook out of business. Like they previously tried with Buzz, and Wave, and Orkut.
My first reaction was best summarized by Alex Hackbart:
I need another social network account like I need an asshole on my forehead
I do love competition however, since it should (theoretically) only benefit the users. Still as a user I’m quite indifferent about it. As a developer on the other hand it’s interesting to keep an eye on it. If it takes off I’ll probably will have to work with the API at some point in time. The video’s found in the read link are very well done and certainly worth a look.
There is however one big difference with the situation in which Google+ is released compared to Google’s other attempts at a social network: Android.
Just yesterday Google’s Andy Rubin announced that over 500,000 Android devices are activated every day. Google could theoretically go ‘all Internet Explorer on Facebook’s ass’. Pre-installing Google+ on every single Android handset sold from now on like Microsoft did back in the day with Internet Explorer and thereby killing Netscape.
Oh wait.. I forgot about Android fragmentation. Never mind…
When I woke up this morning I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading on Twitter. The talented guys from Sofa announced they have been acquired by Facebook and are moving to Palo Alto to work at Facebook HQ.
The Sofa team will be moving from Amsterdam to Palo Alto in the coming weeks – and we’ll make sure to infuse some of our particular flavor of Dutch culture at Facebook.
These guys are the people who brought us Versions (which landed them an ADA in 2009) and Kaleidoscope. These apps were however not part of the acquisition.
They have a page up giving some insight into the future of these apps:
That leaves our developer tools, Kaleidoscope and Versions. They will remain available from both their websites and the Mac App Store and our support email address will be manned by all the usual suspects. The apps are temporarily not available from the App Store for administrative reasons, but we’re working with Apple to get them back up as soon as possible.
Great developer tools are built by great developers. We feel that both Versions and Kaleidoscope have a tremendous amount of potential ahead of them. We are working on a stellar way to fill the gap our team leaves behind and can’t — but will have to — wait to tell you more soon.
So stay tuned.
Although I’m sad to see such a talented team leave Amsterdam Appsterdam, I’d like to congratulate the team on their deal and wish them all the best of luck at Facebook.
Our app Pixamid is heavily reliant on Facebook - so much so that unless a user logs in with Facebook, the app is almost useless (it will still take photos and save them to the iPhone, but no magic whatsover)…
We went ahead and built our app with this reliance.
This post immediately reminds me of some advice Marco Arment gave during his speech @ Webstock 2011
You don’t need to rely on another service (and you probably shouldn’t)
It’s a great talk with some great advice. If you haven’t watched his speech yet I recommend you do so. It’s on Vimeo.
It seems Pixamid learned this lesson the hard way.
Follow up to my previous post on this situation.
I’m not quite sure if this is a case of “ends well, all well” or “to little to late”. Not so sure we would have seen the same result without the media coverage.
What do you think ?
So I just read the linked article. If what this article claims is true Facebook is walking a dangerous road.
Read the full article for details
So incase you missed the news, Bill Gates (re-)joined the social network world by (re-)joining Facebook & Twitter. So after big sites like TechCrunch, Engadget and CNet brought this story apparently he managed to get 100.000 followers on twitter in a mere 8 hours. Now that’s an accomplishment.
Edit: He’s on 163k already :)
Today Facebook released a new version of their iPhone app brining it up to version 3.1.
They have also finally included a feature I have been waiting for, for a long time. Push notifications. As you can see on the picture you can easily customize for which events you want to receive push notifications.
It took them a long time to get it implemented but I’m happy it finally arrived. Push notifications however isn’t the only new feature.
There is also a new feature that allows you to sync your contacts with Facebook. Before you jump to the app and turn on this feature, please be warned. I’ve tried the feature today and turned on the “Replace photos” feature.
The app started replacing pictures on my contacts, which was to be expected. however it also put pictures on contacts that weren’t even on my Facebook. I’ve been reading some posts about this and apparently I’m not the only one having trouble with this feature. After turning the sync back off it removed all the pictures of my contacts. NOT cool facebook!
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