Awhile ago they brought on Brandon Walkin (http://www.brandonwalkin.com/blog/) who is, arguably, one of the most detailed-oriented user interface designers on the planet. He's also a very talented Cocoa developer and apps that he's worked on have won Apple Design Awards.
Next, they acquired Sofa, another Apple Design Award-winning design & software firm who have created some of the best-looking apps for OS X.
Now they nabbed Push Pop Press, founded by Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris, who were both instrumental to the launch of the iPhone on the software side.
Facebook is building an army of UI designers/developers who 1) used to work at Apple, or 2) have built apps Apple has deemed best-in-class.
I'd be really surprised if Facebook isn't working on something big to go up against Apple and Google. There were rumors of a Facebook phone, perhaps Facebook is building their own hardware and need a world-class design team to craft its OS? I can't see Facebook sticking all this amazing talent on a redesign of Photos or Chat, or updating icons in Facebook's iPhone app.
I doubt Facebook would build a hardware device. Instead, I think they'll do a 'social OS' that uses Android for all the low-level stuff, but with the Google apps all replaced with apps that have deep Facebook integration (messages, contacts, photos, etc.).
Microsoft Bing apps (e.g. Maps) could round out the features that FB doesn't build themselves, and they could use Amazon's Appstore in lieu of Android Market.
But to your point, it's possible these designers are at work making this social OS beautiful. Android in the back, iOS in the front.
Meh, they control it to an extent. The core open sourced Android (gingerbread atm) is clearly "good enough" that all anyone has to do to credibly fork it and still deliver a high end device is bring as much to the table as Google itself does.
That's not a herculean task although only a handful of companies qualify and most of those are better off jumping through Google's hoops to get the full experience anyway. Facebook probably isn't one that wants to jump through Google's hoops though.
I'm not saying the FB phone will be a success. Clearly some people want it. Let's go benefit of the doubt and say it will be technically awesome. Well so were a lot of other flops. I think a FB phone is one of those things on a knifes edge that could be a Vista/Zune/Edsel level flop or could be the iDevice killer every tech pundit has been waiting on for the last decade.
+1, there's definitely an interesting pattern of Facebook acquiring top Apple-related design talent.
TechCrunch has a series of posts on "Project Spartan", a high-priority project within Facebook where they're rumored to be making a new massive mobile distribution platform based on HTML5 (http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/15/facebook-project-spartan/). Maybe related?
No no no, there's no way a Facebook phone would take off (especially in the already crowded market). Facebook's environment is built around iterating quickly, with okay solutions, and checking for bugs by pushing it out. It's a great hacking spirit and probably fun to work with, but is really ill suited to hardware and consumer products (look at how long it even took Google to get used to having discrete releases)
I wonder how Mike Matas would feel after a year of being at Facebook...
When I first read about them and heard his TED talk, I really believed in what he was saying, that they aspired to change the way the world reads. I believed in his revolution...
Sure, it is. But Push Pop got a ton of publicity partly because of Al Gore and partly because of Mike's passionate Ted talk, so I presume they would have been able to get more than enough funding. And of course you can't change the world if someone does it before you.
Anyway, the folks at Push Pop Press, as well as Sofa and the rest of top tier design talent that Facebook have been eating up, are smart bunch and I'm sure they know what and why are they doing. Or it could be the allure of a metric buttload of money.
I want to believe that its because Facebook is showing them a bigger 'vision' but this smells like $$ to me...
People can be smart but sometimes the short-term allure of happiness (in this case the payout) can harm their long-term growth and impact to the world.
Sad to see. This was the only promising execution of ebooks for the tablet age, and Facebook is where it goes to die? I know they probably got obscene amounts of cash, but it is still disheartening to see innovations swallowed up by decidedly non-innovative companies.
While I thought Our Choice was a pretty snazzy product, and I think it's a shame that they're discontinuing work on their publishing platform, they did have a somewhat conservative approach to ebooks. No selectable text, "interactivity" that was pretty much limited to embedded videos and charts, and so on. What made it special was the incredibly "fluid" interface, meaning there wasn't a single button or control, you navigated the book purely by touching what you wanted to move and it worked like magic.
But there's lots of other ways books can be done in a digital format. For one really excellent example look at Inkling [1]. Now that's revolutionizing a medium (in this case textbooks).
Push Pop's first publication did have a novel interface, but it was fundamentally no different than what we are used to. It was a book with other forms of media embedded within it.
I can get behind Inkling being revolutionary because it seems to me (focusing on their Social Learning feature) that it is closer to Vannevar Bush's vision of the memex. It is like the memex[1] in that it is taking advantage of the interactivity and social capabilities of current tech to create an interface that better matches the way we learn. The way we learn indirectly from others via books (where information is frozen and up to you to learn from it) and the way we directly learn from each other (mainly communicating about a topic in a conversational manner).
Is it a pure talent acquisition? As Push Pop Press's core business (coffee table iPad books) is so distant from Facebook's. Maybe they want to do something Flipboard-ish?
"Although Facebook isn't planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories. With millions of people publishing to Facebook each day, we think it's going to be a great home for Push Pop Press."
It's kind of hard to deny the parallels between Flipboard and tech like what Push Pop Press has developed. I know a number of people for whom Flipboard is the preferred method of interacting with Facebook. I'd assume that Facebook has some means of knowing which applications are using their API the most. Maybe there's some underlying data here that we can't see, like maybe Flipboard makes up a lot of Facebook's mobile usage, and we know how important it is for Facebook to control the user interaction.
I guess this must be a talent grab. I haven't seen a more fluid, well-oiled app than Our Choice. The real question is, if Facebook's supposed iPad app is already close to launch, what's with the timing behind this?
At least they aren’t gobbling up a generation of talented youth and putting them to work plastering optimized and personalized little text ads on everything ;-)
My first thought upon hearing that it was Push Pop Press was education. Because of their work with Al Gore. Maybe even the predecessor to the TYLIP. Perhaps it could even be field-tested at the beneficiary school district(s) of the $100M pledge.
In Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age", a plot device (not central), is The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. It is an adaptive AI tutor. To realize TYLIP, hard AI problems will need to be solved. Yet, it is possible the iPad is a big step towards a simpler Primer.
"TYLIP is...a book that is powered by a computer so advanced it’s almost magical, and it teaches children everything. It does this through a fully interactive story. It teaches you how to read, how to do maths, it teaches you morals, ethics, even self-defence. ‘Diamond Age’ is a very entertaining read, mainly because of the TYLIP."
Mike Matas is awesome. I've been a fan of his work since Delicious Monster and I hope (if the past endeavors haven't already) that this transaction sets him up nicely. His photography and videography of his world travels at http://mikematas.com/ is amazing and I'd love to see more.
Wow, that's just a straight up talent acquisition maybe with some patents thrown in for the impending legal meltdown. Remember the first acquisition Parakey? It was going to be a web OS of some sort so even Grandma can easily share pictures or something. Instead we got a perennially buggy Facebook iPhone app. It just goes to show how hard it is for growing companies to find good talent in the valley.
These are really brilliant people though. Must be amazing to have all those people in one building. Still, have no idea how Facebook can really bring out the best of that talent, Apple seems like a lot better place except for their old school secrecy. I guess it's hard to shine when you have two super novas like Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive.
really.. why the downvote ?
can't a man be blunt on HN anymore, i have to make sure i don't hurt anyone feelings
isn't this a "dipshite company" in Mike Arrington's dictionary.
Awhile ago they brought on Brandon Walkin (http://www.brandonwalkin.com/blog/) who is, arguably, one of the most detailed-oriented user interface designers on the planet. He's also a very talented Cocoa developer and apps that he's worked on have won Apple Design Awards.
Next, they acquired Sofa, another Apple Design Award-winning design & software firm who have created some of the best-looking apps for OS X.
Now they nabbed Push Pop Press, founded by Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris, who were both instrumental to the launch of the iPhone on the software side.
Facebook is building an army of UI designers/developers who 1) used to work at Apple, or 2) have built apps Apple has deemed best-in-class.
I'd be really surprised if Facebook isn't working on something big to go up against Apple and Google. There were rumors of a Facebook phone, perhaps Facebook is building their own hardware and need a world-class design team to craft its OS? I can't see Facebook sticking all this amazing talent on a redesign of Photos or Chat, or updating icons in Facebook's iPhone app.