Okay, I’m going to argue that the futures of Facebook and Google are pretty much totally embedded in these two images:
The first one you know. What you might not know is just how completely central photos are to Facebook’s product, and by extension its whole business. The company’s S1 filing reports that, in the last three months of 2011, users uploaded around 250 million photos every day. For context, around 480 million people used the service on any given day in that span. That’s like… quite a ratio. A whole lot of people sign up for Facebook because they want to see a friend or family member’s photos, and a whole lot of people return to the site to see new ones. (And I mean, really: does the core Facebook behavior of stalking provide any satisfaction without photos? No, it does not.)
Really, Facebook is the world’s largest photo sharing site—that also happens to be a social network and a login system. In this context, the Instagram acquisition and the new Facebook Camera app make perfect sense; this is Facebook trebling down on photos. The day another service steals the photo throne is the day that Facebook’s trajectory starts to bend.
(As an aside, I’d love to know how many photo views happen daily on Facebook. My guess is that the number utterly dwarfs every other metric in the system—other than pageviews, of which it is obviously a subset.)
You might not recognize the second image up above. It was posted on Sebastian Thrun’s Google+ page, and it was taken with a working version of Project Glass out in the wild, or at least in Thrun’s backyard. It’s a POV shot taken hands-free: Thrun’s son Jasper, just as Thrun saw him.
Thrun also demonstrated Glass on Charlie Rose and it’s worth watching the first five minutes there just to see (a) exactly how weird the glasses look, and (b) exactly how wonderful the interaction seems. This isn’t about sharing pictures. This is about sharing your vision.
Now, Google’s big pitch video for Glass is all about utility, with just a dollop of delight at the end, but don’t let that fool you. There is serious delight waiting here. Imagine actors and athletes doing what they do today on Twitter—sharing their adventures from a first-person POV—except doing it with Glass. It’s pretty exciting, actually, and if the glasses look criminally dorky, well, we didn’t expect to find ourselves walking the world staring down into skinny little black boxes, either.
So the titanic showdown between Facebook and Google might not be the News Feed vs. Google+ after all. It might be Facebook Camera vs. Project Glass.
It might, in fact, be pictures vs. vision.
by Robin Sloan | Read more:
The first one you know. What you might not know is just how completely central photos are to Facebook’s product, and by extension its whole business. The company’s S1 filing reports that, in the last three months of 2011, users uploaded around 250 million photos every day. For context, around 480 million people used the service on any given day in that span. That’s like… quite a ratio. A whole lot of people sign up for Facebook because they want to see a friend or family member’s photos, and a whole lot of people return to the site to see new ones. (And I mean, really: does the core Facebook behavior of stalking provide any satisfaction without photos? No, it does not.)
Really, Facebook is the world’s largest photo sharing site—that also happens to be a social network and a login system. In this context, the Instagram acquisition and the new Facebook Camera app make perfect sense; this is Facebook trebling down on photos. The day another service steals the photo throne is the day that Facebook’s trajectory starts to bend.
(As an aside, I’d love to know how many photo views happen daily on Facebook. My guess is that the number utterly dwarfs every other metric in the system—other than pageviews, of which it is obviously a subset.)
You might not recognize the second image up above. It was posted on Sebastian Thrun’s Google+ page, and it was taken with a working version of Project Glass out in the wild, or at least in Thrun’s backyard. It’s a POV shot taken hands-free: Thrun’s son Jasper, just as Thrun saw him.
Thrun also demonstrated Glass on Charlie Rose and it’s worth watching the first five minutes there just to see (a) exactly how weird the glasses look, and (b) exactly how wonderful the interaction seems. This isn’t about sharing pictures. This is about sharing your vision.
Now, Google’s big pitch video for Glass is all about utility, with just a dollop of delight at the end, but don’t let that fool you. There is serious delight waiting here. Imagine actors and athletes doing what they do today on Twitter—sharing their adventures from a first-person POV—except doing it with Glass. It’s pretty exciting, actually, and if the glasses look criminally dorky, well, we didn’t expect to find ourselves walking the world staring down into skinny little black boxes, either.
So the titanic showdown between Facebook and Google might not be the News Feed vs. Google+ after all. It might be Facebook Camera vs. Project Glass.
It might, in fact, be pictures vs. vision.
by Robin Sloan | Read more:
