Facebook has accumulated enough ill will over the years -- with its cavalier attitude towards users' privacy, with the multiple times it's screwed over developers who bet the farm on their platform, and so forth -- that people just automatically assume now that if you lie down with Facebook you get up with fleas. "Facebook" means technology that, at its heart, is looking for a way to screw you over. It's a tainted brand.
If it were any other company making this acquisition -- Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, anybody -- you'd see much more willingness to give it the benefit of the doubt. But people see the Facebook logo being slapped on the Rift and assume, from bitter experience, that this means their Rifts will be turned against them, in the same way that Facebook turned their browser and their smartphone and their network of friends against them.
I would hit anybody over the head who would dare to say "Yeah, I hate Oculus now. If only they had gone with Google instead of Facebook"
Really the pot calling the kettle black, here. And make no mistake, any of the other companies you mentioned should have resulted in just the same kind of backlash. Not a single one of them cares about you or your privacy. They are all out to collect as much information as possible. It is high time people realized this.
Coming soon to an immersive 3D VR headset near you: a lame Facebook-branded knockoff of Second Life.
Filed under: #metaverse
But yes second life applications... I don't see it at all.
Uh? Notch very specifically notes social VR would likely be great, and that he does not mind, just does not care.
Don't get me wrong- I'm extremely upset about it due to facebook's clearly evil history - I don't know how anyone could deny this, given user exploitation and tracking[0] - and the fact that Oculus Rim values the combined ideas of virtual reality and augmented reality (which I don't think should be combined) as 1/10th the value of Whatsapp is beyond me.
However, is souped-up video conferencing really such a terrible idea? I wouldn't go to a 10-year high school reunion on Oculus, but I definitely would reunite with my college buddies every few weeks if we had something less lame than Skype or Google Hangouts to do it on.
[0] http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/11/facebo...