Did it really, though? I don’t know anybody that stopped using it just because they had to have a Yahoo account to login.
Recalling the stories from the developers working at Flickr, when Yahoo took over it prevented them from working on what they could see coming (mobile apps, playing nice with Twitter, and so on) and instead working on trying (and failing) to make Flickr a Yahoo product. Many good people left Flickr out of frustration with the Yahoo corporate team.
That is what I suspect will eventually happen to OR: the Facebook owners will be forcing them to retool their product with Facebook first and foremost, whether it is a good fit or not. It’s just a very strange buy (especially compared to the defensive purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp), and I don’t think it’s going to end well. My guess is a lot of the developers are going to leave despite retainment bonuses.
I’m surprised that so far no-one here has randomly speculated about Facebook trying to make a competitor to things like Second Life, IMVU, etc…
A Social site + 3D VR Headsets…
Zuck’s next purchase will obviously be Steam…
– Ducks and runs –
That’s interesting, I never heard much about the behind the scenes stuff at Flickr.
My big confusion here is this - how in the world is this even remotely linked to Facebook? How could they try to make it in any way useful to Facebook? There’s the second life competitor speculated by nadir_seen_fire (also speculated in the other BB thread talking about this acquisition), but that seems like a big stretch for Facebook. Or is this really just a case of a big company purchasing what they think could be a very profitable smaller company, even though it’s not really related to their core business at all? Somebody made a comment in the other BB thread, speculating that maybe Zuck is just a big fan of this project, and wants to be the one to help bring it to the market (and make a shit ton of cash in the process). $2 billion seems like a hell of a lot of money to gamble on that though.
how about VR porn with friends and a few of our advertisers
Although you’d also need to hack Sony’s camera as well, I don’t see why not. That’s assuming they don’t provide any PC support, which I think they might. There’s also a few other teams working on VR tech, including the people who had formerly been doing the hardware experimentation for Valve. I’m still not sure this won’t go the same way as the '90s VR enthusiasm (i.e. nowhere), but if it does end up going somewhere, I think there are enough other bits of hardware in the works that Oculus isn’t strictly necessary.
Right now, I don’t think it is. I don’t even think it’s about the company’s future profits. I think they’re looking long-term here. Facebook reacted to mobile, but now I think they’re looking to get ahead of the curve in terms of future interfaces for computers (and therefore social media). I think they’re aping Google a bit here. They’re probably going to spend quite a while playing with it and seeing how it takes off with games, etc. before they actually do anything with it that’s related to Facebook’s core business.
Yeah, they’re trying to be pro-active instead of re-active. But we all know how that’s going to play out. FB will thrash around for a few years, trying their damnedest to shoehorn their whole social networking business model into some pie-in-the-sky VR social networking paradigm, and, after a spectacular bellyflop rollout of FBworld or whatever they call it, major FB shareholders will break out the torches and pitchforks. Then they’ll quietly sell off the remaining fragments of Oculus for a dime on the dollar. Meanwhile, some other up and coming company will have taken up the VR gaming gauntlet and finally done it right.
What significant changes have they made to instagram or whatsapp? I rarely use one and never use the other, but they don’t appear to have messed with instagram significantly and it’s been two years since the acquisition.
Yahoo seems to have taken over the role of AOL as the last company you want to see buy your favorite start up.
Oculus Rift is (was?) a lot less likely to be restricted to a single heavily-DRMed hardware platform.
My best guess is that they’ve seen the signs that Facebook’s ubiquity is good for a few more years but is ultimately headed the way of MySpace, and they’re looking to transition from a social networking company to a vague, generalized “technology” company like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo.
Which does mean they’re not necessarily going to shoehorn Facebook into the Rift. But I can just as easily see them pulling a Google+ and trying to force Facebook into as many unrelated sectors as possible.
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That does sound like a highly plausible scenario. I suppose it’s possible, however, that they’ll wait for a while, letting Oculus do their own thing, and see how VR plays out as a computer interface technology, and if it starts to gain popularity, they’ll be there, ready to push whatever VR-based social media initiatives they’ve been playing with in the meantime. But that’s a sort of best-case scenario.
I would love for this to happen, but I listened to a bit of the conference call in which Schmuckerberg was talking about the acquisition and it seemed entirely certain he bought it to morph into a communication/remote presence tool. He’d be entirely foolish if he axed the gaming aspect, but I don’t think he’s planning on just letting it continue along its current course.
You have to admit, the new Oculus Rift demo is pretty impressive.
In interesting news, Michael Abrash has just left Valve to become Oculus’ new Chief Scientist.
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