This is why it's annoying to me that so many people use Messenger.
You know what I can use text anyone, anytime without having to worry about ads? My phone.
I feel like there's a downward trend of companies using free stuff to "hook" people and then just feed them an inferior product over and over and over again (more ads, etc). It's not just creating worse products, but it's creating worse customers (who don't understand actual costs when they see other products that are "free").
What happened to just "paying for x, get x." As a customer, I miss those business models and as a business, I miss those customers.
And that's the reason I only contact people via email if I can help it!
Open, decentralized, accessible, and not locked in to some vendors shitty whims. I get why people don't like it, but until we come up with a good distributed and decentralized alternative, I'll stick with email thank.
Anecdote, but this past year, some new experience with a few people showed me part of the apparent reason for the dominance of Messenger: Discovery.
You meet someone. You want to follow up with them, for whatever reason. Most people have a public enough profile on Facebook that Messenger is the obvious answer. And, like Facebook, "everyone" is on it. Even if they conduct their more personal and intimate social media interaction on other platforms. To "reach out and touch someone", ping them on FB/Messenger.
Not saying I like giving FB that position. But, they currently appear to indeed have and dominate it.
P.S. A frequent circumstance is a friend or acquaintance of a friend or a coworker. Someone at a party. Etc. Your respective social graphs are already grazing if not overlapping, so connecting the dots on FB is trivial.
Maybe I'm just using the wrong app, but as far as I know texting on Android is garbage. Plus having to get phone numbers is annoying when we're already connected on FB. And phone numbers are randomly loseable when getting new phones, and I can't access my texts from my computer, and I lose texts if I get a new phone, and attaching media barely works, and messages get broken apart at a character limit, etc etc. I'd rather use Messenger any day.
Of course I don't like that it's controlled by FB, because I hate FB, but I'm probably going to keep using it until it's replaced by another free social media platform that 'everyone' is on by default.
Hm. I really dislike Google's ecosystem, so I don't think I'm interested in switching to it. And my initial experiences with hangouts were super negative.
I'm using an app (messenger?) that just puts a slightly better UI on Android texting, but it's still pretty bad. I should look into using Telegram, though.
By far the biggest gripe with texting is that it's not persistent across devices. That's a core requirement that seems like it should have been solved a decade ago.
Realistically, how would Google sync texts between devices without sending your texts to Google? And once you're doing that, why not use Hangouts, which does, in fact, do pretty good cross-device sync?
I ask as a fellow Google-avoider; I think your competing requirements are asking for an impossible thing.
Apple's iMessage does this, each device has a public/private key that is shared. When you send a message it is encrypted with all of the recipient's devices public private keys. If the device is not on at the time Apple holds on to the encrypted message but cannot read it because the private key is stored on the device. The only downside to this is that you cannot sync old messages to a new device.
I never understood why this model (giving an app away entirely for free) wasn't considered predatory pricing. Especially for the companies who can bankroll a business with a loss for a long enough time to gobble up market share.
nothing happened, its just psychology. "predictably irrational" by dan ariely does a great explanation of free vs paid.
I dont like many of those business models. Its basically push everybody out of game by offering a great product for free and then when nobody is there make it worse.
This sure opens a space for a new player, but this new player will just play the same game ( offer something for free then make it worse and so on )
I really don't like ads just like most everyone else, but I can't help but feel there is a missed opportunity here. Facebook just put classic mobile letterbox ads in a side scrolling container.
In such a unique platform such as Messenger you could get a bit more creative. One such example: Suggested pages to message. This would get companies leads and keep people on the Messenger platform. This might not be the best use, but with this product, Facebook can do better than just a re-skin of mobile banners.
Time to start using other apps more. I already have other chat app contacts for most everyone I use Facebook Messenger with, and there is no friction to switch.
If anyone's ever clicked on an ad on Facebook not-by-accident, I would love to know.
Invariably Facebook's ads are either a) highly non-relevant [the vast majority of ads], or b) I already know about what they're advertising. I even try to help, to make the ads relevant: every so often, I go through Facebook's list of my interests to weed out the many ridiculous inferences Facebook has made about me. I bet that's more than 99% of the Facebook population does!
I find interesting stuff through Facebook ads all the time. It's on a level that I often miss that it's actually sponsored content and not from a page I like.
- I get too much spam, so I tend to check email less.
- It's not as "real time" as I sometimes need it to be. Sill feels more like mail than like conversation.
- I like to know when people read my messages (I know there's apps that allow this, but it's not ubiquitous)
- I like to know when people are typing (aka, are currently in the conversation)
- Different email programs send/format emails differently. Some seem to keep all the replies attached to the bottom of the latest message in a way my email program can't figure out and collapse.
I'm a fan of email tbh, and I wish more resources were invested in making it better, but I just don't think it lies in the same "space" as instant messaging.
There are so many apps available for messaging right now. I use SMS, Hangouts, Twitter. Many people like Snapchat and Allo. You can try asking your friends which ones they use.
Every free centralized messaging service at some point needs to find a business model that finances the platform. Right now the (IMO) best choice are decentralized messaging protocols such as XMPP (https://xmpp.org/) or Matrix (https://matrix.org/). Similar to email you can (i) run your own server or decide which server to use (ii) communicate with people on other servers, and (iii) choose from multiple independent client and server implementations.
For Matrix Riot is the best client implementation which runs on multiple platforms (https://riot.im/). The (afaik) only usable server implementation is the reference implementation (https://matrix.org/), but at some future point the currently pre-alpha Rust-based Ruma implementation (https://www.ruma.io/) could be a good choice too.
A nice thing about XMPP is that server-based transports can provide gateway-functionality to other networks. For example with Spectrum (http://spectrum.im/) it's possible to use your XMPP client of choice to chat with your friends that use Facebook Messenger.
I understand the complaint, but what is the alternative? As a social network - you cannot charge to be on the site; otherwise you will never be more than just a niche.
Yes, people hate ads. But, if you were Facebook, what would you do differently?
It's no surprise that Facebook is valued so much. Although, HN would loath this move but these ads don't feel intrusive at all. They are already making ~$2.5B in profit in a quarter and who knows, that could possibly be just scratching the surface. Facebook is smart enough to gradually up the amount of inventory without vexing its users.
Zuckerberg's genius was to realise that their primary objective is to create an engagement platform and gradually move towards monetisation; grand vision, or plain luck, it's working marvellously.
> similar to how we surface birthday notifications or where we let you know if a friend is currently active on Messenger
Guess it doesn't matter then. I'm rarely in the messenger homescreen, but when I am, those are just as annoying as ads anyway, with no way to remove them permanently (which they gleefully tell you when you hide them).
First Facebook Messenger and then WhatsApp. Ads are inevitable, it's just the matter of "when". We will live in ads. Google ads might decrease and such ads targeting personal apps are on the rise. This needs to stop.
Facebook has a few moves here. By doing a limited test in both Thailand, a high ad engagement, growing market [1][2], and Australia, a lower-engagement but high-spend market [3], they can gauge how advertisers respond in two very different markets, while keeping the more numerous [4] North American, Indian, and Brazilian users out of the fray -- and most reputational fallout -- for now.
There is still a small possibility that they'll renege on this plan. Google, whose rivalry with Facebook in the area of messaging is longstanding [5], has largely squandered their potential in this space with a confusing product strategy, but have remained a dominant force in advertising thanks to Search, Youtube, Maps, and Android. Google has recently shuffled up its messaging lineup again by rebooting Google Voice, still having Hangouts, and pushing Duo and Allo, but Facebook provides a unified experience by having all of this in one app. Facebook is no doubt gambling on the fact that any user fallout about ads in Messenger won't be severe enough to cause an exodus of users to a competitor who poses a threat -- and right now, it's unclear if Google poses a threat or just continues to flail ineptly.
Meanwhile, Snapchat doesn't pose a serious risk to Messenger, because Instagram has suitably cloned all of its features while also retaining the core product around curated photos; WhatsApp is a serious player in Brazil and India, is of course now run by Facebook in a brilliant example of market positioning; Skype has hemorrhaged marketshare due to Microsoft's (mis-)management; a few other smaller players target niche audiences (e.g. pseudonymous harder-to-monetize users, gamers, privacy-conscious users).
This leaves their biggest threats European and Asian-operated platforms like WeChat, LINE, Viber, and Telegram. WeChat dominates the Chinese market due to various home turf advantages, while Telegram is popular in the Cyrillic world and MENA, Viber in Europe and Israel, and LINE in Japan. So far, none of them have challenged Facebook in its core markets.
I'm sure messenger will be so much better with "smart" ads. Let's say you are chatting with your friend and say: oh you know that delivery company with black minibuses and all of the sudden you get ads for UPS so you don't even have to google it. Off course FB and the Zuck will eventually take over the World. If not that, then he will definitely take over the World Wide Web.
You know what I can use text anyone, anytime without having to worry about ads? My phone.
I feel like there's a downward trend of companies using free stuff to "hook" people and then just feed them an inferior product over and over and over again (more ads, etc). It's not just creating worse products, but it's creating worse customers (who don't understand actual costs when they see other products that are "free").
What happened to just "paying for x, get x." As a customer, I miss those business models and as a business, I miss those customers.