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Facebook Gives Up On Desktop Apps: Kills Messenger For Windows and Firefox
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook today began prompting Facebook Messenger for Windows users as well as Facebook Messenger for Firefox users with a message saying the apps are shutting down next week. Without much of an explanation, the company plans to kill off both on March 3. It appears that Facebook is no longer interested in developing desktop apps. The Android and iOS versions are still alive and well."
You can always connect to their IM service using a generic XMPP client like Pidgin (too bad Facebook doesn't federate).
Now kill it for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.
Rumor has it that facebook won't even run on desktop browsers.
WE ARE DOOMED!
It seems like this might have something to do with the acquisition of WhatsApp. Or possibly the timing is just convenient.
There is quite true. You can't call news something like this one that affect both these (two) users of that service.
Interesting.
Is the benefit of "making as many people as happy as possible" worth the cost of "keeping nine million different apps running"? In this case, evidently not.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Seems the whole thing is getting desperate... Killing off ideas left and right, paying way way too much for companies that do things EVERYONE else already does? C'mon, 19 thousand million for an IM product, really? Their marketing tech isn't living up to promises and the growth is fading... I'd say the idea pool is dry! I've got a bunch of swampland for sale, interested? Seems like a mental breakdown is forthcoming...
Messenger for Firefox really makes my life easier.
Trust in FaceBook. FaceBook is your 'freind'.
Yeah, right.
We spent NINETEEN BILLION DOLLARS on a chat program.
We spent the GDP of Macedonia on a chat program.
We're Facebook. We're a chat program company, and we spent the price of a brand new aircraft carrier on a chat program with enough left over to buy every man, woman and child in America a pizza with everything.
Short Facebook.
Every time I use the Facebook iPhone app to message, it prompts me to use the iOS Messenger app, and then takes me there. Every. Single. Time. Messenger via a desktop browser now relegates you to this tiny little box in the lower right corner of my 27" screen that i can barely see. I have to hit options, see full conversation to get a reasonable messaging view. I would have assumed with the WhatsApp purchase messaging strategy would be a priority...but my experiences combined with the above article makes me seriously wonder what it is...
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And I'm glad I didn't learn of it when it was useful, that way I wasn't tempted.
Facebook is so dangerous in terms of surveillance and eternal data retention, I advise to never use it, even for mere contact and "private" chat, even with a dormant, empty account you never log to.
I hope this makes the Firefox OS facebook application useless, too! I reckon it (probably) uses the same Social API as the desktop version. But I don't kid myself too much.
Look, the cold hard fact is that Facebook is dying, and there have been no signs of any reversal of that in people under 30.
It's even being actively removed from cell phones.
The metrics are there, if you know how to look.
(no, I will NOT do your work for you)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
How do companies like Facebook not worry about creating the impression - the reputation of being a company that will abandon you with virtually no notice!?
Well, they are the largest social networking provider out there, so when they make major changes that will effect a large group of people i would think that would qualify as something that matters.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
FB chat is just XMPP and easy to setup in pretty much any messenger anyway.
You can always connect to their IM service using a generic XMPP client like Pidgin (too bad Facebook doesn't federate).
Want to bet that wont be the case much longer?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
We spent NINETEEN BILLION DOLLARS on a chat program.
Nope. We spent 19 Billion on 450 Million active users and counting. On a programm that carries itself by asking 1 Euro per year for the service. If we play out cards right, we've just bought the soon-to-be-the-worlds-largest phone and telecommunications company at a bargain price. ... And we expect to play our cards right. Or do you think we screwed up our IPO?
Android just passed 1 billion activated devices. How long to you think it will take before the majority of humanity is communicating and doing most of its everyday work with an android based smartphone? I expect that to happen in the next decade.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You seem to have a strange divergence from reality.
The deal is four billion dollars cash, the rest in stock. Facebook's net income for 2013 was $1.5 billion. The deal ate up 35% of Facebook's cash on hand, so there's not necessarily any debt here to make up, and all things being held constant, my math would have them in the green again within three years.
I don't think that Facebook has any more chance of long-term success than those people silly enough to sell operating systems, but at the moment they're both pretty good rackets. This is a heavy investment for Facebook, but they're not an untalented bunch; they have by necessity made a very fast pig out of a PHP application, and they have (apparently) a lot of money to throw at a new market. Can anyone really say that this makes less sense than whatever chunk of Google's $6.8B R&D budget is going to autonomous vehicles and Glass?
Besides, you're giving Zuckerberg & co. far too much credit for long-term thinking.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.