Facebook's goal is to penetrate as many markets as possible with the fewest lines of code.
Does this mean they don't give a shit about experience? No. It means they want to have a large reach without much maintenance. After that is accomplished, then they can worry about experience on a per device basis.
I don't believe it's correct to just dismiss this as garbage because the application is currently buggy. The entire idea of this approach is to improve the experience across all devices, but for now they are limited because they are still on the first step, implementation. Also note the slide that says "betting on the browser," meaning that Facebook is betting that issues between platforms will eventually fade away.
> Does this mean they don't give a shit about experience? No. It means they want to have a large reach without much maintenance. After that is accomplished, then they can worry about experience on a per device basis.
Facebook maybe able to get away with this, but almost every other developer and plenty of device makers will not get that second chance and will be dismissed by customers.
This is the same thing that happened to cross platform Smalltalk programmers (e.g. VW, VisualAge). They sure could target a lot of machines, but their programs always acted crappy and slow with poor UIs. This is ok when your "customers" are forced to use your program like a custom app for a business, but it sure doesn't work for others. Even Adobe runs into user hate for their non-native widgets and ignoring platform conventions.
Most non-technical consumers are good about getting a feel for how things work on a platform (e.g. ctrl-c for copy on windows, smooth scrolling, metro on WP7). This leads to a disconnect when an app behaves differently. They may not be able to express the problem, but they will certainly notice it.
Does this mean they don't give a shit about experience? No. It means they want to have a large reach without much maintenance. After that is accomplished, then they can worry about experience on a per device basis.
I don't believe it's correct to just dismiss this as garbage because the application is currently buggy. The entire idea of this approach is to improve the experience across all devices, but for now they are limited because they are still on the first step, implementation. Also note the slide that says "betting on the browser," meaning that Facebook is betting that issues between platforms will eventually fade away.