Facebook dominates social media with nobody second

Apr 5, 2016
http://blog.naytev.com/facebook-is-king/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11440461

Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook Messager by itself is huge.

A few years ago, Facebook tried to buy Snapchat for around three billion dollars. Facebook recognized the future with messaging.

Allegedly, messaging will rule the world, which means other players could gain in popularity.

Apr 5, 2016
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3058584/why-kik-thinks-chatbots-will-kill-webpages

As of this morning, Apr 7, 2016, 130 comments exist in the above Hacker News thread. Here's the top-rated comment:

I have visited a local community center event website for 15 years. They recently moved over to Facebook. Their feed is public. If I don't have the FB app or am not logged into FB, it's almost as if there is an entire division of losers, sitting around at Facebook cooking up ways to make me login or install the app. From are you a robot unreadable captcha's, to denying the page exists, to limiting the number of posts, limiting readable post content, its ridiculous.

Whether they are king or not, all I am ever going to remember them for is taking a gigantic shit over what the Internet is supposed to mean.

Second comment:

I tried viewing the Facebook page for my local goban meetup recently to check on a schedule, and FB put a giant floating translucent white box over the bottom half of my screen with a single "login" button in the middle of it. So I could see there was content below but it was incredibly hard to read. There was not even an "X" button to close it. What it was saying was "join our website or get the hell out".

I understand enforcing login for write operations, since it's obviously required, but they really do seem to have no regard for the original ideals of the internet. They're not alone; Quora and others have done similarly stupid shit.

These companies are all supposedly started by hackers who love the internet and technology, but it's sad to see capitalism take hold in such an ugly way.

But ...

The problem isn't Facebook. The problem is that the community center decided that maintaining a website wasn't worth the cost and/or the effort.

And ...

or maybe it's a failure of tech in general that maintaining a website isn't worth the cost and/or the effort ;)

That was a glib remark, but in all seriousness ... for the average non-technical user, who's friends are all on Facebook, their event and group system is a godsend. Non-FB solutions should realize that and figure out ways to make more accessible (and cheap ... aka free) systems

And ...