Hey guys! Sorry for the app store issues. Trying our best with Apple to figure out what's up. In the meantime, think my deep-dive Q&A with TechCrunch gives you some good background on Rooms (warning: product nerd alert). What's up? Any questions?
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/23...
@joshm Thanks for the update, let me know if you want to work with me on adding Rooms to UXArchive.com so people can have a better view on how the app works in the meantime :)
@zackshapiro Basically, we realized that the web would not have existed without linking. That's how people discovered things – you'd get linked to it, or know the link URL yourself. We needed to replicate that, but copy-and-pasting a URL is a cumbersome process on mobile (we tried with Potluck) and even if you do that you have to wait for a mobile web page to load. It sucks.
So we thought, if URLs were the easiest thing to share on a desktop computer, what's the easiest thing to share on a phone? Photos! You can share photos everywhere, in any app. It's just as flexible and portable as a link was on the web. And screenshotting seemed like the phone's equivalent of control c, control v. On top of that, the QR code technology meant we could automatically do the work for users without any work on their part... or even knowing what a QR code is. It just magically works, which felt cool.
@zackshapiro I hope so! That would mean a lot to me. We need to reinvent the URL for mobile, and I think photo-based linking makes a lot of sense – in our app, and others.
@thinker@rrhoover@joshm I wanted to post it but I had already hit my quota for the day! One of those times where I wish I didn't empty my clip so early!
Without even trying it I think its going to fail.. I think these ideas of Facebooks have a few major problems. 1.) People, especially teens, have a growing dislike of the FB brand. They don't want to join in on another FB product when they are already moving away from Facebook itself. 2.) When a product like this launches with tons of press and hype, and is still buggy, it leads users to becoming frustrated and therefore not willing/hard to get them to try it again.
I think FB would be better off launching these small concepts under a brand new company name and therefore not getting press, OR investing in already growing popular start ups with teen demographics like SnapChat, ect.
What do you guys think? @rrhoover
@maxpbeaumont This is what Josh Miller had to say about the app's early success: "So Rooms, again, I’m looking for, “Is anyone addicted to what we’ve built?” Not, “Does everyone in the world get it right away?” Because if everyone in the world got it right away, we probably didn’t build something that interesting."
@maxpbeaumont@rrhoover "I think FB would be better off launching these small concepts under a brand new company name and not trying to get a ton of press" - I think Facebook actually does a good job of this. If you look at the Rooms website, you wouldn't know it's Facebook. And they don't necessary try to get press - if FB releases anything, everyone just wants to write and talk about it. I'm personally impressed with their dedication to side projects/trying new things.
They're doing exactly that, @maxpbeaumont: launching off-brand products through relatively autonomous (from what I've gathered) teams. We all know Rooms and other spinoffs are part of Facebook but the normal person does not. I've spoken to several techie teens (@michaelsayman, @orbuch) that tell me that most their friends have no idea Instagram is part of Facebook. This is smart, because of the concerns you mentioned and it diversifies their brand. cc @lee94josh
@eric3000@maxpbeaumont I think it was Marc Andreessen who said that big things usually start out as little, almost toy-like things that seem inconsequential. This seems to be in line with Josh Miller's comment about building things that people don't initially get. It's an intriguing concept. Though I wonder how someone could get addicted to something without "getting it". But I'm all for experiments. Go FB.
@eric3000@maxpbeaumont early success, Eric. The full context of that quote is about how it takes time for people to understand something and for it to catch on
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