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Facebook isn't a competitor to most B2B products, but it's defintely the Excel of the B2C world.
For the other cases you mentioned: Groups to collaborate, Events to organize - these are all completely underwhelming alternatives to other market products. The biggest tragedy of Facebook is that it has enormous scale but it can't write comprehensive products that satisfy all of that scale uniformly. You get the lowest common denominator, which is why customers go for niche alternatives.
Excel is not Facebook. Yes, Facebook is big. Excel is big in its industry. However, Excel has just enough of a balance between niche and scale. Excel is about computation and reporting. It solves a very specific need that is fortunately applicable in all types of applications. As soon as you try to go outside the bounds of what Excel can do (large data analytics, more customized reporting, interactive applications) you stop trying to rationalize Excel and start using other tools. People do the same with Facebook. More people do it with Facebook because Facebook doesn't effectively solve as many core needs.
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I think animating the transformation from a normal loop to a list comprehension is a great way to show how the syntax translates between the two forms. Very awesome and comprehensive post.
It was like that in the earlier days. Every update kept reducing the amount of visible content, and severe reductions in density. Here is a screenshot of my screen - http://i.imgur.com/fM2WIVf.png (1920x1200) - almost two million pixels. There are a total of 7 (yes seven) sentences of article and 5 sentences of comments. I have to click and/or scroll to see anything more. (This is their densest layout - the single column version has a total of 4 sentences.)
With Reader they had a community of people who read a lot, and an interface design that worked well for doing that. They took that away. By not having access via an open standard like RSS for G+ streams, they don't even allow alternative interfaces that can address their problems.
I can only conclude that the people who persevere with G+ do so despite it, not because of it. They must also be very patient and do a heck of a lot of scrolling.
Definitely a case of style over function. It's really frustrating.
I am not exactly sure why they discontinued the user experience, since it seems like it could be really useful for finding relevant parts in potentially long videos.
[1] http://youtube-global.blogspot.ca/2012/02/captions-for-all-m...
It's kind of ridiculous that he was "cut out" from a job like some kind of child who was no longer part of the "club". It's grossly unprofessional to disconnect an employee without any due process or policy.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised given the events leading up to the situation.
I'm not certain, but I think the average engineer would feel more loyalty to a company that has given them multi-generational wealth.
I'm all for engineers getting paid, but in this case the guy didn't even have to do what most wealthy engineers do: deliver an actual successful product to market.