Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs

"Joel Seligstein, a Facebook engineer, is relieved he no longer needs to keep track of which friends like texts vs. email vs. chat."<p>Joel seems to wrongly assume that the preference is defined by the person alone. Whereas more often than not, the medium is defined by the nature of the message and the sender _is_ the best judge. - It is an opaque abstraction to not let me choose the medium to deliver in.

<i>SMS and email are different. SMS costs $ per message. Email does not. In the Facebook UI, if you add a SMS user to an email thread, he will receive numerous SMSes from email users who don't realize that they're racking up his bill.</i><p>Wait a minute, is that true? Do you pay for receiving text messages in the US? That does seem a little crazy from a European perspective.

This argument would be more compelling if Apple Mail weren't so awful.

If Facebook didn't solve 'real' problems then it wouldn't exist. Apple doesn't need Zuckerberg and Facebook doesn't need Jobs.<p>Both companies to a large degree embody their founders and because of that take wildly different courses of action.<p>Jobs at Facebook would be a disaster because the company has not been setup in a Jobs-friendly manner.<p>Both companies are also wildly successful because they avoid design by committee. Facebook is about sharing your information with everyone, it's not the place for privacy nuts. Apple is about delivering the best computing experience possible, it's not the place for tinkerers.<p>Jobs heading Facebook would be a platypus, it just doesn't make sense. Jobs has been on a roll for a while, maybe Messaging is Zuckerberg's Newton. Maybe it isn't. Calling it on the first day is something I would not do.

This article is really astute. The headline initially scared me off because I thought it was going to be some kind of Apple/Jobs love fest.<p>My first reaction when I read about this new Facebook component was that it would be hard to use without being annoying. The medium of communication <i>matters</i>. For example, you might be forgiven for using txt-speak in an SMS, but when I get an email written like that, it gives me a negative impression of the sender.<p>I'm also trying to get my head around what problem this is actually trying to solve. It is much the sort of "meta problem" that programmers like to solve. The devil is in the details though, and usually those fall through the cracks. Witness all the mostly awful attempts at "write once run anywhere" desktop GUI implementations.

Respectfully I disagree. I think facebook did the right thing by walking away from email in its current form. I think subjects in messages are no longer needed and just because there are mismatches between the different systems, doesnt mean an attempt should be made to unify them.<p>Just looking at this long term, one can see that facebook will likely try to push their interface as a standard communications interface to everyone that you want to reach (business or otherwise) and ultimately let users choose how they can be contacted. This has far reaching implications for a product trying to reach their customers. Maybe they will even break this out into a paid product for businesses to reach their customers, who knows. Theres alot that can be done with a system like this. And im surprised it took so long for someone to do it. I believe the market has been begging for something like this for a while.

An interesting thesis. I can see both sides.<p>On the one hand, the idea of mixing all these messaging formats together sounds like it might be a confusing mess -- a Google Wave-level UI disaster. As he points out, these media have very different usage patterns that may not turn out to mesh that well.<p>On the other hand, saying "Facebook should just do a beautiful, elegant implementation of what everybody else has already done" is a very low-risk strategy. It doesn't innovate or solve any new problems. As a strategy for an industry-defining company, this is a route to irrelevance.<p>So is it better for Facebook to risk failure, or risk being boring? I have to say they've recovered well from failure in the past (Beacon, early mis-steps with news feeds), so my vote would be for the gutsy, risky, change-the-game strategy.

People keep saying Zuckerberg/Facebook doesn't know what they're doing. Yet competitors keep falling and Facebook keeps growing. Maybe things aren't so obvious?

in response to bretthellman: Zuckerberg is sharp, and he filled a user need with the status update / news feed. But now he's hired a bunch of superhackers, and they are tending to solve superhacker problems. The problem is that superhacker problems are not the same as real user problems. This is the difference between Apple &#38; most other tech companies.

"Without a Steve Jobs, Facebook is going to become the new Google. A technical powerhouse that can't build usable software"<p>I disagree that. Google have made some usable softwares. Before Gmail came, webmail was a mess. I guess people remember those popups and irritating ads from Yahoomail, hotmail etc.

This post reminds me of the David Platt post on why the iPhone will fail: <a href="http://suckbusters2.blogspot.com/2007/06/apple-iphone-debut-to-flop-product-to.html" rel="nofollow">http://suckbusters2.blogspot.com/2007/06/apple-iphone-debut-...</a><p>Both articles essentially state that the company (Apple/Facebook) should not try to innovate, because their implementation will suck and then go on to mention problems that are rather trivial and will not actually be problems.<p>Sorry, but I think Facebook is good enough at product design that they can pull this off. Facebook doesn't need Steve Jobs; Zuckerberg is pretty bad ass at making products people like and use extensively. If you need evidence you should look at Facebook, a lot of people REALLY like that service.

Facebook has never been good at explaining their products. Remember "Once every 100 years media changes"? That doesn't mean their products don't work. I've never had the impression that Facebook was overflowing with incredible technical challenges (well, they have scaling problems, but the impact there isn't user-visible), their brilliance has always been on the product side.<p>That said, first and foremost, Facebook is a contact management app. Allowing people externally to send messages to a FB account is the next step in managing contacts. The UI enhancements are unimportant in comparison.

This argument would be more compelling if MobileMe / Ping weren't so awful.

I don't see how this is any different receiving a tweet. You can choose to receive a text message (SMS) from a particular follower if you wish and that works great.<p>Uhh, if you base your SMS arguments from the U.S. outlook alone, you have clearly missed the point. The rest of the world has adapted to SMS much better than the U.S (well, the stupid charges here are to blame) and facebook clearly has a global outlook.<p>Abstracting the communication medium is actually solving a pain - because you, the receiver, have decided where you will be available. So, if you decide not to get a text, you can do that.<p>Having said all that, I find the whole thing creepy for now facebook will know not only who you are friends with, who your family is, and who your ex is, but also where you were last night; but, the zinger is facebook can now gauge your social signals in real time. That's a scary thought!

The Jobs hero worship is growing increasingly grating.

No one needs Steve Jobs? Just a personal sense of focus and increasing quality, and stepping back from problems to gain some sort of vision once in awhile. You can't hear people talking if you're head is located at the pit face next to the drill!

Everyone I know just uses facebook on their phones. No need for all this integration, I think SMS is old here in the UK, people still use it, but it's fading away.<p>You can get unlimited internet on your phone for an extra fiver, or tenner a month.

Facebook and Apple should do a CEO swap. Zuck spends a day at Apple consulting on whatever Steve wants his input on, and vice versa.<p>It's foolproof!

Growing number of people seem to believe they can second guess Steve Jobs. Well, if it were so easy why aren't they just doing it themselves?<p>The author basically thinks he is smarter than the guys who founded facebook, and that they should do something he believes Steve Jobs would have done had he been with facebook?

re: Apple Mail, it just depends on who you ask. If you prefer Gmail, then Facebook could have mimic'd Gmail UI instead. The point is that unifying the different transports doesn't solve a real user problem. It's not like people are having problems sending email or SMSes to each other today.

This is pure genious: James Daly <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html</a>

Apple has done Email and it is UGLY. This guy obviously hasn't used .Mac webmail.

Agree w/ wvenable. That's my point.