It is 2017 and I don't know of any video conference system or software that "just works" everywhere, all the time, under all bandwidth conditions. If Facebook thinks they can pull this off by tight control on hardware, they will sell like hotcakes.
It probably wouldn't be anymore reliable than all the other conference software but at least it doesn't drag a mountain of bullshit and lockin with it.
We just use email and in person meetings though, I still don't quite get the point behind video conferencing.
So Facebook can see what's in your house and on your body and deliver those relevant, targeted ads you so dearly crave.
"This guy has a vacuum cleaner. Let's recommend him more vacuum cleaners to buy!"
Even though every single one of the platforms claim to be using cutting edge tech for targeted ads but all of them suck. I don't see them improving even if you give them a guided tour of your home including closets
More info - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14755498
In other words, you use your phone's camera to do whatever, and the phone notices you linger at a window or a billboard (by tracking your eye movements and retinal responses.) You get home, and suggested items are virtually added to your living room.
Maybe you walk past a clothing store and it adds a new suit to your reflection.
Or AR games that require you to move past physical ads or storefronts, and take pictures of them.
There can be good utility for ads without being dystopian. Like furniture sets you want buy to preview in your new empty apartment - not items you are totally uninterested in buying. I'm sure there will be countless ideas to get ads on AR pretty soon that will be unaggressive and jive well psychologically
(I realize this is where people bring up 1984 which I think is just cynically off-topic.)
Sure, and the—unstated, admittedly—presumption was that FB was targeting consumer not enterprise use. I understand why enterprise videoconferencing systems exist.
> I'm okay with Facebook trying out a cheaper version for the average consumer.
I'm okay with them pursuing it. I'm just asking what the need is it serves.
Facebook views its mission as connecting people.
Other tech companies are heavily investing into hardware for the home including communications, along with various in-house services relating to AI, including Microsoft, Google, Sony, Amazon and Apple. That category will continue to rapidly expand, the products and services will get more and more powerful/capable. That hardware, such as the Echo, is a direct threat to Facebook's social monopoly, specifically because these devices will keep getting more powerful and keep reaching for nearby functions to assimilate. Those nearby functions will include numerous social & media aspects (two of Facebook's foundations now are images and video).
Why did Facebook aggressively target chat apps (WhatsApp, FB messenger) & photo apps (Instagram)? Because they were nearby functions to their core social product. It was very, very well understood that Instagram had the potential to expand into Facebook's territory, using images as the beachhead. Facebook is guaranteed to be concerned about the same concept at play with the devices being deployed into people's homes that are basically AI footholds. Today? No, today does not matter in that sense; this is all about the next 5, 10, 20 years and what these in-home devices will be capable of and what people will use them for.
No, Facebooks mission is to collect demographic data in as much detail as possible and to use that to sell ads.
Connecting people is a sideshow to all of this.
I never said it was their business model. You're confusing two separate aspects of what they do. They're directly related, they're not the same thing.
Facebook's mission is to connect people. That's what enables their business model. The former came before the latter, by necessity. They had a lot of connected users before they had a business model. But hey, try building a $500 billion social network business, before you start connecting up the users, see how it works out.
Guess what, I did. We reached about a million monthly active users at some point which was quite the high point, but still that's a drop in the bucket compared to where the web is today. Still, back then 100K active users per day put us well in the top 500 of all websites.
Needless to say I fell a bit short of the mark of making a $500B company but we really were trying to connect people and video chat was exactly the medium that we used. And no, we did not build up user profiles to track their behavior, not because we could not but because we felt that was not right.
So instead, we charged for the service and eventually it went under.
Personally I will not use any of these services unless I pay for them and my data is not retained or mined. Zuckerberg is the last person on the planet I would trust with my data.
That's also why I use plain old SMS rather than whatsapp and email or IRC rather than Gmail or Google hangouts or similar.
It's strange, but you sometimes miss the "mundane" parts of life. Especially if you are on assignment for several months, there might not be much to say day after day, but just having some company is a nice feeling.
I can also see how it would be helpful for remote teams. If these devices were just on all the time and team members could peer into what others were doing or listen in on spontaneous jokes.
Of course I know there are ways to do this now with existing solutions, but it's more of a hassle to get it setup and also to automatically reconnect if there are network problems.
We had this arrangement once. A cube of four of us, had a big always-on tele-screen dialled into our remote team (four guys in another city). Fun at first but then we had to mute it (the background noise in both directions was very distracting, annoying to other employees). So we ended up in a farcical scenario of having it always on but relying on waving at the camera to get someone's attention, or IMing them, to unmute :)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/ocean-plastic-pat...
(Disclosure: My project)
OH wait in that instance because Siri's AI is horrid.
Or are you just kicking at Siri, which isn't relevant here?
Using Apple devices for video call seems to be extremely popular.
Whyever would I want or need a dedicated video chat device? Why would anyone?
Also, a laptop-sized (so, I guess, somewhere between 10” and 19”) isn't going to make people feel like they are in the same room.
I suppose if you wedded a 3D camera to a HoloLens-like AR system, with some clever software, that might make people feel like they are in the same room.