{"id":14544,"date":"2012-04-11T08:55:47","date_gmt":"2012-04-11T13:55:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=14544"},"modified":"2012-04-11T08:55:47","modified_gmt":"2012-04-11T13:55:47","slug":"facebook-is-like-an-nypd-police-van-crashing-into-an-ikea-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/04\/11\/facebook-is-like-an-nypd-police-van-crashing-into-an-ikea-forever\/","title":{"rendered":"“Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever”"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interesting analysis<\/a> of the Instagram takeover by Facebook:<\/p>\n

First, to understand this deal it\u2019s important to understand Facebook. Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience (insider jargon: “UX”), Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever \u2014 a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life. The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life \u2014 that\u2019s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world \u2014 but man, does it work.<\/p>\n

Now consider Instagram. If Facebook is a sprawling, intertextual garden of forking pokes, Instagram is no more complex than a chapbook of poetry: It lets you share pictures with your friends and keep track of strangers who post interesting pictures. It barely has a website; all the action happens on mobile devices. Thirty million people use it to pass time in the bathroom. You can add some fairly silly filters to the photos to make the pictures look like they were taken in the seventies, but that’s more of a novelty than a requirement. So that\u2019s Instagram. It\u2019s not<\/em> a site<\/em>, or an app<\/em>. What it is, really, is a product<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

To some users, this looks like a sellout. And that\u2019s because it is. You might think the people crabbing about how Instagram is going to suck now are just being na\u00efve, but I don\u2019t think that\u2019s true. Small product companies put forth that the user is a sacred being, and that community is all-important. That the money to pay for the service comes from venture capital, which seeks a specific return on investment over a period of time, is between the company and the venture capitalists; the relationship between the user and the product is holy, or is supposed to be.<\/p>\n

So if you\u2019re an Instagram user, you\u2019ve been picking up on all of the cues about how important you are, how valuable you are to Instagram. Then along comes Facebook, the great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear. You turn on the television and there it is, right above the Empire State Building, humming. And now a hole has opened up on its base and it has dumped a billion dollars into a public square \u2014 which turned out to not be public, but actually belongs to a few suddenly-very<\/em>-rich dudes. You can\u2019t blame users for becoming hooting primates when a giant spaceship dumps a billion dollars out of its money hole. It\u2019s like the monolith in the movie 2001<\/em> appeared filled with candy and a sign on the front that said \u201cNO CANDY FOR YOU.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting analysis of the Instagram takeover by Facebook: First, to understand this deal it\u2019s important to understand Facebook. Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience (insider jargon: “UX”), Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever \u2014 a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,15],"tags":[204,391,29],"class_list":["post-14544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-technology","tag-blogging","tag-facebook","tag-photography"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3MA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14544"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14546,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14544\/revisions\/14546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}