Not trying to deter you, but be aware there is a GPS glitch in Samsung phones. Fix is expected in September, but the Epic (sprint version) was supposed to have been fixed, and there are still issues. Great phone though, I don't blame you for loving it.
- JCunwired
Awesome job; favour? Next time you run into Zuckerberg can you tell him no, I will not be his nice Jewish boyfriend. I mean yeah I do like the nerdy hoody look, but I'm looking for someone with more direction, more ambition: knows what they want outta life and are not afraid to reach out and snatch it. And also to quit face stalking me :-)
- The Real sofarsoShawn
from iPhone
It was a great delivery. Loved the focus on simplicity, and one of the best explanations of the social graph ever.
- Bill de hÓra
I almost fell off my chair when I saw those simple lines of code. At that point Bret, Mark and The Facebook Team deserved, at least, a standing ovation.
- Lula Rocha
Oh there's gonna be some waves of backlash on this one I'm afraid! I understand why the opt-in on the personalization on profiles, but not sure it was a good idea without some global initial prompt to opt-in for the user. Reminded me of the google buzz roll out. But you did look very smooth and relaxed. Zuck stills needs to loosen up a bit though.
- Phil Ashman
Well, I couldn't listen because the stream doesn't aggregate. There are still dups out here. You might have made provision for them.
- Melanie Reed
Phil, no Publicly Available Information was added in this launch. All that data has always been available (well, for the last several months at least). What Facebook added was privacy controls around that finally. Facebook added *more* privacy, not less. Have you seen what Google and Twitter profiles reveal to developers by default?
- Jesse Stay
That was a great and ground breaking keynote. As a recommendation engine provider we are following closely.
- denizoktar
It is amazing how Bret can simplify APIs and make it sound so easy. The url centric API design is awesome and it reminds of the clean urls at Friendfeed. Thank you Bret
- Shakeel Mahate
Nice job Bret. Very innovative and complete, I'm blown away actually!
- Chris Myles
That was pretty amazing - it's clear you have had a huge influence on what Facebook has done since they brought the Friendfeed team on board. Oh, and I like Fuki Sushi too - I used to go there when I lived in Palo Alto, but the name always made me titter ... and you had to pair it with In and Out ... c'mon you guys did that on purpose right? Yeah, OK, I'm 12.
- Laura Norvig
I agree, but those three well-executed features need to be done in the context of marketing/sales magic, otherwise the product won't take off. GMail by all rights should be the dominant email client today, or at least every other surviving email client should have copied the conversation view from GMail. FriendFeed should be bigger than Twitter. I'll admit that twitter got the "few things" part, but I don't think they won based on doing those few things well.
- Bruce Lewis
Gmail is getting there. It has already passed all of the other webmail systems -- they just don't realize it yet. iPhone is similar in that it hasn't won in absolute numbers yet, but it's the winner nevertheless. FriendFeed is a topic for another day.
- Paul Buchheit
"At the office, maybe we'll finally have an easy way of chatting with remote people while discussing a presentation or document (e.g. audio iChat with a shared display)." Wouldn't that be nice?
- Benjamin Golub
Gmail is getting there, and will eventually get there, but it has Google associated with it. Smaller products with weaker brands have a lot more trouble. There's already a tablet out that uses multi-touch to enable multi-player games, for example. Do you know what it's called? I don't; I just happened to see it.
- Bruce Lewis
There's no question that brand matters, and it would be difficult for anyone other than Apple and maybe G or M to successfully launch the iPad. You have to pick a strategy that works given the resources you have. Also, I bet that other tablet isn't actually good (clunky to use).
- Paul Buchheit
Paul, it helps me to hear you say there's no question that brand matters. Your essays really resonate with me, and when I read this one my first inclination is to run off and refine my core features. But refined features only bring new users if you've got the sales/marketing thing figured out.
- Bruce Lewis
Not every game is winnable Bruce. I wouldn't try taking on Apple and Google for the cell phone market, for example. Google succeeded in large part because nobody else realized that search was important.
- Paul Buchheit
"if the basic product isn't compelling, adding more features won't save it."
- Clare Dibble
Bruce, exactly. Especially since we're all seduced by the idea that on the web, we want to scale virally. In this conversation, we're talking about competing with Apple and Google. Do you have a particular target audience you could to go after first? Maybe dominate a given market segment - a niche or a subculture by focusing on something that's just for them, then grow into other niches...
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- Auntie Buttinsky Botts
Paul thanks for an enlightening article. How would you define winning? Can you win the game and still be a loser, for example MySpace won but could not sustain itself?
- Shakeel Mahate
Hold that thought, Mary. I'd really like to talk about it, but I don't want to hijack the discussion any more than I have already. Paul has a great post here about what does and (just as important) doesn't constitute a great product. Now that it's established that brand, etc. matters, I'm happy to stay on topic.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
I'm glad you address the different strategy implicit in developing gmail within Google. An independent startup trying to design a product doesn't have the brand or the support resources that something like gmail did (to Google's credit) will likely need to look at product design in a more holistic way. This isn't a direct criticism of you, Paul, but we like to boil down the product...
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- mikepk
I agree with your premise though, having lived through the experience of building a 'good' product that wasn't 'great'. We did a lot of things wrong with the "Grazr product" from Grazr. First and foremost in my mind was not focusing on the core elements and adding hundreds of features that just made the thing a confusing mess. We needed a benevolent dictator and I wasn't in the position to be that person.
- mikepk
So by this logic trying to turn Gmail into twitter will probably fail? Something like trying to turn Greader into a social network? One you take the care to identify the essential attributes that make something great, bolting on more attributes to make it something else doesn't seem a good idea.
- Todd Hoff
If your product is a fashion accessory, it doesn't need to be good.
- Gabe
People will buy all kinds of crap for the latest fashion accessory.
- Gabe
don't you have to be good at some point before you can iterate to be great?
- David Tran
Dan: Paul's thesis is that you can start out at great and then iterate to be good.
- Gabe
More seriously, Paul is using "great" to mean something nearly orthogonal to "good", rather than being "like 'good', but better".
- Andrew C (✓)
from Android
"Great" in this essay means it has features that are novel or way better executed than the norm. "Good" means achieving the norm for feature-completeness.
- Bruce Lewis
"Great" is a discontinuity. The iPhone is a good example because there was really nothing like it before, so it didn't matter that it was lacking some obvious features like copy&paste.
- Paul Buchheit
Well, now, hold on. On paper, there were phones that did most of the things iPhones did, even maps and youtube. The app potential wasn't even a huge selling point for the first year or so if I remember right; it was more that it had a browser that really worked. (and even then, there were other smartphones out there... people just didn't really write apps for them, not nearly on the iPhone's scale.)
- Andrew C (✓)
Andrew, I tried those phones, and they were all bad. Having features isn't good enough -- they need to actually work. iPhone was the first phone with browser that worked, maps that work, etc.
- Paul Buchheit
"I've written a textbook entitled "Machine Learning: An Algorithmic Perspective". It will be published by CRC Press, part of the Taylor and Francis group, on 2nd April 2009. The book is aimed at computer science and engineering undergraduates studing machine learning and artificial intelligence. There are lots of Python code examples in the book, and the code is available here. Where special datasets are used they are provided with the code, and there are links to additional datasets at the bottom of the page."
- Tracy
from Bookmarklet
"A REST API should spend almost all of its descriptive effort in defining the media type(s) used for representing resources and driving application state, or in defining extended relation names and/or hypertext-enabled mark-up for existing standard media types."
- MikeAmundsen
from Bookmarklet
Amazon.com: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition) (9780136042594): Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig: Books - http://www.amazon.com/Artific...
We sent the final pdfs of the new edition of this book off to the publisher. The market reacted by gaining 2% on the day.
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
"In 26 out of 27 European Union countries, Mr Buffett’s plans [to leave most of his fortune to charity] would not just be shocking, but illegal. The exception is Britain."
- Simon
from Bookmarklet
"In continental Europe a big part of an estate (often around half) is reserved for the surviving children of the deceased and must be equally divided between them. ... Finally, “clawback” laws in many countries stop parents from dodging forced heirship by giving assets away while they are still alive. This applies to gifts made in the last years of life (two years in Austria, ten in Germany), or much longer: in some countries, no time limit applies."
- Paul Buchheit
I bet the Europeans think it's crazy that we reserve half for the IRS :)
- Private Sanjeev
I thought only millionaires had to reserve half for the IRS.
- Gabe
As of 2009, it's 45% for estates valued at over $3.5MM, with exemptions for small businesses and farmers. It affects less than 1% of the US population at present. It's set to revert to $1M in 2011, but there's pretty much no chance that Congress will let that actually happen.
- Joel Webber
@Sanjeev: In Europe the inheritance tax rates vary, but can be similar to the US, and the exemption limits are often much lower: "[2007] France if you are inheriting from a spouse you receive up to €76,000 tax free. Anything above this limit is taxed at between 5 and 40 per cent, depending on the size of the gift. But the rate for non-relatives is a hefty 60 per cent, with no...
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- Simon
@Simon: Interesting -- I had no idea it was that high. It's also telling that, as the Economist article suggests, (continental) European law seems to strongly favor blood relatives (especially children) over the wishes of the deceased. I'm not sure which is preferable, but it's an interesting dichotomy.
- Joel Webber
Serendipity is becoming more and more important. You have to be able to find things you didn’t even know existed — it becomes more and more critical to your success. From my perspective, it’s more about serendipitous encounters with people, though, than information. - http://factoryjoe.tumblr.com/post...
and (against most intuitions) we can engineer more of it into the world...
- Dan Brickley
"You have to be able to find things you didn’t even know existed" - a statistically unlikely people finder would be cool instead of all these reinforcing algorithms and graphs ;)
- Bill de hÓra
When you see the mistakes Friendster, MySpace, Friends Reunited (UK) made that led to their irrelevance, it makes sense to keep pushing the art forward. I believe Facebook realise that and thus keep taking the best aspects of Twitter/FF etc. However they still need to retain their innovative edge, which I believe they have kind of lost over the past year.
- Jamie
Golden rule in software: you can't satisfy all your customers all of the time. So, in order to improve there is no way around pissing users off.
- Rene, Pro Button Pusher
"However Play is a very unique Java framework. It does not really rely on the so-called Java Enterprise standards. It uses Java but tries to push all the good things from the frameworks based on scripting languages like Ruby On Rails, Django, ... etc. to the Java world. We really tried to get the best of the Java platform without getting the pain of traditional Java web development: slow development cycle, too much abstraction, too much configuration..."
- Bret Taylor
from Bookmarklet
And Bret is probably the first reasonable evaluator of existing Java web frameworks I see. Because 95% of those are in fact unreasonable. Bret! I will appreciate if you also try to find some reasons in HybridJava - http://www.hybridserverpages.com/ Alex
- Alex Serov
"The experiment has important implications for the eventual development of a technology to create false human memories. We could one day “learn” by having experiences directly inputed into our brains."
- Simon
from Bookmarklet
Please allow 6 to 8 weeks for delivery
- Charles Ying
You would be amazed how many large corporations still do this.
- dthree
I'm not ignoring the fact that corporations go through a lengthy process to ensure the quality of their products. Of course Facebook does this too, and so do I personally. The point is, we are the ones who are qualified to determine when the app is ready. Apple is just a middleman, and they have a very limited ability to test the quality of our app.
- Joe Hewitt
A couple times Apple has caught bugs in our app and notified me of it, but they have also missed huge bugs that went through. The app on the store right now is orders of magnitude more buggy than the one sitting in the review queue.
- Joe Hewitt
I can only assume the review process is there for Apple to test compliance with their terms of service, and any bugs they find along the way are incidental. Thank goodness the web doesn't have a terms of service and a review queue.
- Joe Hewitt
With 40 apps per day per reviewer, I'm surprised the approval process works as well as it does.
- PXLated
Has any other company ever been faced with as many apps in such a short period as Apple - Just curious
- PXLated
If we developers always programmed everything to be perfect before releasing it, nothing would ever get released. ; )
- John Wang
it would look like an MMO they release half broken stuff every two weeks like clockwork
- Robert Higgins
Sorry, Glen, the context in almost all of my tweets relates to iPhone development :)
- Joe Hewitt
Of course, Apple can do whatever they want, and I can go elsewhere. I am making suggestions on how they can improve their flea market and prevent people from going elsewhere. I believe the web has set the precedent that big platforms like the iPhone can thrive even without a centralized quality control bottleneck.
- Joe Hewitt
But Joe, the iPhone isn't like the web as a whole - it's more like gaming platforms and probably more open then they are. Will be interesting to see what happens on Android and if in fact it is more open, and if so what kind of chaos may ensue.
- PXLated
Are you serious - "prevent people from going elsewhere" - Where? And pass up the iPhone audience/marketplace? Even if Android is a success, developers won't leave iPhone in spite of all the bitching.
- PXLated
The iPhone is not a "gaming platform" until they tell me I can't develop anything but a game for it. A significant chunk of iPhone apps, mine included, are basically iPhone-optimized websites written in Objective-C. I admit that I don't see anyone, myself including, abandoning Apple over this issue, but I do believe that the quality of apps on the platform is being hurt by it. Just because other platforms are even more restrictive, like Playstation or some mobile platforms, is not an excuse.
- Joe Hewitt
It's not an excuse but none is needed, Apple developed a platform and set the rules just as the gaming platforms did/do. I'm personally not sure the (overall) quality is being hurt either.
- PXLated
In fact, maybe Apple should be a lot more restrictive - 65K apps probably confuses the hell out of many users. Maybe they need a rating system and then start eliminating the poorly performing apps. Get it down to a reasonable (best of breed) 5K ;-)
- PXLated
"Apple developed a platform and set the rules" - well there's a news flash. I don't think anyone needed to be informed of that. I think Joe's just trying to make the point that centralized control isn't necessary for the good apps to rise to the top. Would you consider the web to be a success if there were 65k sites (please don't get pedantic and point out that sites aren't apps; the argument holds for any reasonable multiplier)?
- Joel Webber
"Get it down to a reasonable (best of breed) 5K" - And exactly from what larger pool would you take that best of breed? If the breed's too small, you can't *have* a best-of-breed. The web's an unholy mess, but its size and chaos are precisely what makes it successful. People still manage to find the good stuff.
- Joel Webber
It would look like the website where I work....
- Don Schuetze
What would the web look like if a developer could be shut down for an alleged ToS violation? Like FaceBook?
- Kevin Marks
That's a lot better than how web applications ship. Please allow a few months before we change it.
- Burcu Dogan
Apple is famous to put limitations at the beginning and then drop them ( remember drm?) I am pretty confident that the approval process will be easier and quicker in the near future.
- funkyboy
from iPhone
You would have [insert any corporate review process here]. For significant changes, this is understandishable. However, it gets insidious when everything looks like a nail ... even if it isn't.
- Joe D'Andrea
read it late though, but i would hate it, then maybe web might not be as popular, interesting and powerful
- testbeta