They also copied the timeline feature from Twitter.

Before that, people had a wall and you could go there and read what they wrote and poke them ... remember poking?

They do seem rather good at buying good product companies or copying ideas, which could serve them well in the metaverse-space (ugh...), once it's established.

No, they bought FriendFeed for that.

I miss that site. It had a real sense of community, threaded conversations that worked, no suggested posts, no adverts woven into the content. Then it was gone.

A big company acquiring small things and developing them successfully is a pretty common tactic. Many of Google's product, if not most, were also from acquisitions. This includes Maps and YouTube, and some of the less successful ones were not acquired.

Yeah but that isn’t what I’m referring to. It’s clear FB is investing billions to build their vision of the Metaverse in house, at least for now, and my point is that they haven’t actually proven to anyone that they are capable of building a brand new thing from scratch that reaches critical mass without acquiring it elsewhere. In that sense I agree with investors who have sold the stock that this is a big risk.

Their Like button was pretty ingenious and Instagram is still a market leader. Disregarding the fact that they didn’t create it, they have been good stewards. Also, while VR isn’t big, they did create a hit hardware device with the Oculus 2. While Oculus was acquired Oculus 2 is nowhere close to the experience of the Original wired dev kit, and they iterated from that to the Oculus Go to the Oculus Quest 2.

Also keep in mind Apple has been doing a LOT of prep work for AR. We just don’t notice it but each iPhone comes with a full advanced AR sensor suite, capable of super imposing objects into our field of view. The only missing piece is the physical strapping of the iphone to one’s head, but if you did that the iPhone is capable of delivering Hololens-like promised experiences.

Zuckerberg created a culture of copying rather than innovating, driving out all of the talented employees. The long-term consequences of that leave you with a banal organization incapable of shifting with the market.

Interesting then that the community has massively adopted React and PyTorch as defacto defaults for web dev and deep learning. How is it that these untalented lifer's left behind are doing these wildly crazy good technical things?

I suspect Reacts adoption is more along the lines of "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" than because it was genuinely novel. The space of JS frameworks was very well explored by the time React was created.

PyTorch is based on Caffe which was created by Yangqing Jia at UC Berkeley.

You're crazy, React's shadow DOM and approach were a step change at the time.

Elm had a virtual DOM before React even existed.

You can argue (and I'd agree) Facebook has talent for cherry-picking the best parts of innovative projects. But cherry-picking in and of itself doesn't constitute innovation.