Facebook has lost it... they seem to have completely lost focus on what they are trying to do. They just made their user experience even worse by adding more crap.
You are reasonable. It's even more interesting considering the nosedive Facebook's taking that they'd purposefully abuse the presence of another for marketing purpose.
"The App Center will begin rolling out to people in the U.S. today"
What is up with Facebook and US-only products? Their Camera app is not available in most countries. Even their app for managing Pages isn't available in my app store (they still keep showing me the annoying message to download it). And it takes them literally order of magnitude of months (if ever) to get their products worldwide, like with Facebook check-ins.
its not just Facebook with us-only or us-first products. i believe it has to do with legal issues with other countries.........or good old beta testing
Has this always been the case? No, Apple gradually made all these countries available.
Terms of use have to be drafted and reviewed by lawyers for each country. This will take time. Why go through all that trouble and wait months if you can gain valuable insights by a quick launch in your most importanht market?
Facebook's apps on the app store do not make use of the option for a custom EULA, so nothing there needs translation. If they are already launching for the US store, what possible benefit could there be to withhold the app from the many (small) european app stores?
(And then proceed to put up huge banners in the other apps hassling users to download the new facebook camera and pages apps - even going so far as to provide a button that sends you an international SMS with a link that doesn't even work)
Also all submitted apps goes through scrutiny before getting published. To make sure they dont violate any top conflicting issues in your distribution store
You need to translate things for an international rollout which takes time. Plus US is a known devil and easier to rollout and look at numbers to fix the glitches.
Sure. But that shouldn't be a reason to not launch it in India, for example. I have never seen a non-english keyboard in my life here.
Very few countries have internationalization as a necessity. For most places, having the app in native language is a plus, but most people still frequently use the web in English.
I mean, Instagram could figure all the rollout challenges with a single digit amount of people. One would expect a post-IPO company to do so too.
Like Zuckerberg said: Move fast, fix later. Design is important (hell, I'm a designer) but not the most important thing when launching. They'll improve it later. They didn't go around buying up talented designers like SOFA for nothing: http://www.madebysofa.com/
And you will have a good enough product but never an awesome one, as "later" never comes, and when it comes the person that created the feature is not in the company or is not available or does not remember why he did it the way he did it or they are cascade bugs....
This approach was used by American cars and was very good for testing different things while the industry evolved, but when industry matured the Japanese(and German) with the "stop the assembly line until the bug is fixed" won.
Sometimes good enough wins, some time perfectionism does.
The car-analogy is false. Or did you get your car for free and will it be replaced with a better car next month?
From his video: "Actually one of the core values of Facebook is is "Move fast." And we used to write this down by saying, "Move fast and break things." And the idea was, unless you are breaking some stuff you are not moving fast enough. I think that's still basically true. I mean, right now, we've optimized so much of our culture around just making it so that people can come and build things quickly. Right, whether it's everything from having the right tools in the right development environment to build things quickly, to nightly code pushes, hiring the best people who have a bias towards just pushing things very quickly, very entrepreneurial. The whole culture is tuned around that. And I think there's probably something in that for other entrepreneurs to learn which is that making mistakes is okay. At the end of the day, the goal of building something is to build something not to not make mistakes." http://www.sweetspeeches.com/s/1889-mark-zuckerberg-moving-f...
I didn't think anyone would argue against it as it's how most startups build. Besides software is never 'done' correct?
That doesn't seem like a fair comparison. A fairer comparison would be if the car companies continuously replaced your car with a free upgrade. I could cope with that.
Facebook is sitting on tons of cash. If they cannot attract talented designers then they are in trouble.
Design is very important IMO. You think the majority of fb users will say 'oh look at those nice features'? I bet you not, they'll say I like Facebook or I don't like Facebook because that's how they feel. Design highly influences the user's feelings.
"lets you browse the apps your friends use" & "If a mobile app requires a download, you’ll be sent to install it from the Apple App Store or Google Play."
Are they anything more than a filter on the existing app stores based on my friends usage? What is my motivation as a user to install their app store?
Also, I checked the Privacy settings on my Facebook account and it is not clear how to ensure my app usage is not shared with others. Features first, respect of users' privacy last.
i think the app center could change everything for startups like YOU. facebook gets millions of eyeballs a day. with these eyeballs fb has the power to pick winners and losers for what appears before your eyes.
just like the itunes did for apple.
just imagine if your startup is fb's "promoted website of the week for travel", the possibilities are endless for you.
all of this is of course moot, if fb doesn't promote their app center. as long as they promote it, offer discounts (the way amazon does for their appstore with their "free paid app a day", i think fb could change the way startups are promoted on the web. (itunes already does some of this for the pure mobile play.)
As silly as it seems, I think there's tremendous power in that concept. For a lot of people Facebook is one of the few apps in use. Providing apps inside Facebook sounds like a great way to capture the audience Apple is missing out on.
This could become bigger than Android if they curate and check the apps beforehand. Trust is required to install apps. With Apple you know the apps are authentic. Facebook could deliver the same 'sender ID guaranteed' function. (And of course Facebook captures all the data as well). I expect they'll copy Apple's GateKeeper: http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/security.html
I think I might need to get my consumerism rotated.