> What's your definition of functionality? To serve a purpose well, or the range of operations supported? In my experience neither of those things has been true of the Facebook API (granted I haven't touched it in the last ~2 years).
Think back to 2006. Name one site that had sanitized SQL access to their data, rich tags, sandboxed css and javascript for constructing arbitrary HTML apps within their site. This was revolutionary stuff, regardless of the sloppiness.
> Again, I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but if you're implying that they're now so big that they've got to start taking shit seriously I think you're again being to kind. Smaller startups (including many in the YC crowd) do a better job with less money and employees, and with much smaller user bases.
What I mean is that they were growing like a weed because they kept pushing the ball forward rather than to stop and polish what they had. If they had "done right" by all the developers they may well have stagnated in growth as other companies pushed the UX of social networking forward, or they may have supported old APIs that were incompatible with the changes they made that tightened up the spam problems or increased user engagement. Citing a smaller startup is exactly in support of my point.
As to inflection point, what I mean is that the hockey stick growth is over and they are inevitably going to have to plateau, and so now is the time to get more serious about retention, and that means stability.
> At 50+ billion dollars I see a company that makes a lot of noise about innovation, but does very little that is different than what it did when it launched in 2004 (at scale, granted).
You're entitled to your opinion of course, but they invented the newsfeed! ie. the backbone of every social site for the last 5 years. Also, as I mentioned above, the Facebook platform was incredibly innovative. Their SOA and pipelining of requests is also the first of it's kind. What they do at scale with a dense social graph seems much much more challenging that what Google did coming up. Their entire culture itself is innovative, maintaining daily deploys at scale, with a fleet of engineers who are individually responsible for both front and back-end development of their features. Also remember the scale and velocity issues are what sunk Friendster and MySpace respectively.
You can piss on all that and say it's just glorified email, but in my mind that's just hater-ism fueled by who knows what personal chip on your shoulder. If not, then I'm curious to hear who you think is innovative.
> It depresses me that some of the best minds of my generation are working on how to make more people look at ads.
Salesforce.com was founded in 1999. They've had some of what you quoted for some time. Also note that the Facebook API features you mentioned (FQL & FBML) are now deprecated. I imagine in large part because they were difficult to pull off reliably.
> ... they kept pushing the ball forward rather than to stop and polish what they had...
An API is a contract with your third-party developers. They could have slapped the "beta" label on it (à la Google) and then pointed at that, but they didn't. They put this stuff out there so as to establish a platform for others to build on. It's hard to argue that the foundation for said platform was solid. In school my teachers never gave me better grades when I insisted that my last paper sucked because I was working so hard on making the next one awesome.
> ... but they invented the newsfeed!
So gut check yourself. Is that worth 50+ billion dollars? Novel information displays warm my heart, but this isn't giving anyone a new way to peer into the human body or discover never before seen patterns.
> Their SOA and pipelining of requests is also the first of it's kind.
Have you seen a single thing about Google's infrastructure... ever?
> What they do at scale with a dense social graph seems much much more challenging that what Google did coming up.
Now I think you're trolling. You think it's more challenging to throw together a stream of updates based on a graph that's handed to you versus having to correlate millions (shortly after, billions) of semi-structured documents to answer loosely worded questions?
> Salesforce.com was founded in 1999. They've had some of what you quoted for some time. Also note that the Facebook API features you noted (FQL & FBML) are now deprecated. I imagine in large part because they were difficult to pull of reliably.
Maybe so, but does it mean it wasn't innovative? As for Salesforce, you may be right, I'm not familiar with their product history.
> So gut check yourself. Is that worth 50+ billion dollars?
Whoah, where did 50 billion enter the equation? I'm just saying Facebook has been very innovative. If you want my opinion on Goldman Sachs you'll have to wait for another story.
> Now I think you're trolling. You think it's more challenging to throw together a stream of updates based on a graph that's handed to you versus having to correlate millions (shortly after, billions) of semi-structured documents to answer loosely worded questions?
Look, I don't want to get into a pissing contest about other people's tech. Web-scale anything is hard. The reason I think social is harder is because of the realtime graph traversal. When Google started it was months and months between indexings on most pages. Fulltext indices were something that already had a lot of practical knowledge behind them. I'm not trying to say that what Google did was easy, and neither should you trivialize what Facebook did.
Think back to 2006. Name one site that had sanitized SQL access to their data, rich tags, sandboxed css and javascript for constructing arbitrary HTML apps within their site. This was revolutionary stuff, regardless of the sloppiness.
> Again, I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but if you're implying that they're now so big that they've got to start taking shit seriously I think you're again being to kind. Smaller startups (including many in the YC crowd) do a better job with less money and employees, and with much smaller user bases.
What I mean is that they were growing like a weed because they kept pushing the ball forward rather than to stop and polish what they had. If they had "done right" by all the developers they may well have stagnated in growth as other companies pushed the UX of social networking forward, or they may have supported old APIs that were incompatible with the changes they made that tightened up the spam problems or increased user engagement. Citing a smaller startup is exactly in support of my point.
As to inflection point, what I mean is that the hockey stick growth is over and they are inevitably going to have to plateau, and so now is the time to get more serious about retention, and that means stability.
> At 50+ billion dollars I see a company that makes a lot of noise about innovation, but does very little that is different than what it did when it launched in 2004 (at scale, granted).
You're entitled to your opinion of course, but they invented the newsfeed! ie. the backbone of every social site for the last 5 years. Also, as I mentioned above, the Facebook platform was incredibly innovative. Their SOA and pipelining of requests is also the first of it's kind. What they do at scale with a dense social graph seems much much more challenging that what Google did coming up. Their entire culture itself is innovative, maintaining daily deploys at scale, with a fleet of engineers who are individually responsible for both front and back-end development of their features. Also remember the scale and velocity issues are what sunk Friendster and MySpace respectively.
You can piss on all that and say it's just glorified email, but in my mind that's just hater-ism fueled by who knows what personal chip on your shoulder. If not, then I'm curious to hear who you think is innovative.
> It depresses me that some of the best minds of my generation are working on how to make more people look at ads.
I don't like Facebook or social games either.