What products has Meta developed internally after Facebook that have been a success? I am actually asking this question, it seems like they have only had success purchasing already ramping products, plowing cash into them, and cross-integrating them into their product set. Why wouldn't they just continue to lean into that profile and wait for people with actual good ideas solve this.
I really doubt that 400M number. They try to get me to login to Threads see comments on Instagram posts. Technically I am monthly "active" user, but not really.
I see more Bluesky links in the wild than Threads and they claim only 27M users.
Threads is taking off in regions likely irrelevant to your interests (India, Taiwan, Japan, Brazil, etc). The content on Threads covers national politics and local social issues, which would typically not be shared on a tech forum like this one.
Tech news is still dominated by X and bluesky, so naturally those content sources appear more here.
Threads is an internally developed Twitter clone when Twitter launched in 2006 and Threads launched in 2023? I'm not saying they didn't build it, but it was not an original product design; they waited until there was already a market, launched and deployed it to Facebook users. I will give you the Ray-Ban glasses, but even that was a product that is a better version of Google Glass, so still not really a unique product.
The creep factor of AI glasses is high. That was a contributing factor to the failure of Google Glass, and I’ve seen various reports of places moving to ban the Meta glass. People, in general, are not comfortable with a camera pointed at them. People walking around with cameras on their face that may or may not be recording is not something the average person wants as a common thing.
8x scaling over a time period where the available size and performance of single-image systems increased by more than 8x seems… if not trivial, at least not an “insane achievement.”
Scaling a product like that is an incredible engineering achievement, but I am speaking specifically about product development. What other products has Facebook innovated internally, worked through the product-market fit, and scaled itself? Again, my point is that they have a ton of resources and a huge existing user base, but the only successes they seem to have are purchasing companies that are ramping. They deploy engineers and connect to the existing user base, but they aren't innovative in product design.
I think that might be common enough these days through sound horizontal scaling principals and especially services that scale for you, but Whatsapp launched in 2009, pretty much the turning point for the tech that enables "web scale".
At that time AWS was just rolling out ELB and RDS, people were still fulfilling their (and most) roles on EC2 servers or even more likely dedicated servers / VPS that took day(s) to commission and might have even been setup by hand, there was no Docker, GitHub was new and Actions, Jenkins etc were years away, and there were very few PaaS- or IaaS-type offerings IIRC just a very nascent Heroku and Google App Engine.
“Scaling” as in “making sure the infrastructure can handle much higher load”, or as in “making sure the product remains genuinely useful to people, so that the user numbers go up and not down”? For both, it didn’t happen by itself, but it’s far from rocket science. A sane team of 15-20 people can do it.
Complete nonsense, as anyone who has worked on a service with scale would know. WhatsApp is not even close to the same architecture as it was at the time of acquisition.
Not to mention the load constraints did not grow 7x, it's orders of magnitude more load increase than that.
As the world's mobile data speeds have skyrocketed in speeds and plummeted in price, WhatsApp is now handling orders of magnitude more data per user than when they served merely 450. And it's all complicated rich media which was not handled at the time.
WhatsApp's file limit at the time of acquisition was 16 MB. Today, it's 2 GB. Per file. It didn't have voice or video calling at acquisition either, also highly complex and expensive to run.
WhatsApp grew 7x in user base, but the scale of data and technical complexity grew exponentially more.
If this were so easy, history would not be littered with high profile scaling failures from messaging apps. Most notably Signal, which couldn't handle a 1.5x influx of users from WhatsApp and was down for weeks.
Claiming a 7x scale is technically easy while your data-per-user growth grows probably 50% a year or more is patently ridiculous.
Read you loud and clear. I enjoyed the crazy adventure that was the early internet. Really truly enjoyed it for over a decade, almost two. It's now gone, FUBAR and loaded with trackers. I usually can't even access an online newspaper anymore without logging in and being tracked. That's where I draw the line. It is nobody's business what I am reading. Got a stack of books to read now, instead. Not to say that legit sites without trackers don't exist anymore, but finding one of those randomly, for example as a result of search, is getting harder every day. Of course, the risk is real is that as the quality of journalism has diminished, thanks to trackers and putting the most popular dating advice and recipes on online newspapers' front pages in lieu of the reports of what's really happening in the world, we'll all soon be living in bubbles of filtered, sanatized information. So, it's not just privacy threats anymore.
They acquired Limitless AI in 2025 which had pivoted from “record and rewind anything on your Mac” to a hardware pendant “granola for everything” product. It was not in market for very long prior to the acquisition.
Hardware was very nice & sorry to see they sold. Mine sits in my desk now :/
Limitless used to be Rewind that maintained one of the most useful pieces of software on my Mac, and I use a cracked version now because I refuse to give it up. There is nothing else like it yet. I seem to recall some other thing that aims to be similar, but that might be cross-platform or otherwise Linux-ish which discounted it as a practical alternative. (I don't remember its name unfortunately)
I said Rewind, as that's what the company and product was called at that point before they rebranded to Limitless (and completely abandoned Rewind). The product called Limitless had no relation to Rewind and no plans to integrate Rewind's functionality. Rewind's website continued to exist and continued to accept payments, which is how I found and purchased the app, but there were no updates.
- Rewind uses Apple's on-device OCR (Live Text). That alone sets it apart from every other screen recorder, I've never seen another - you can search by any text that has ever been captured on-screen. I do not trust any OCR other than Live Text.
- The on-disk format is fairly compact. Over 7 months of recording is still under 250 GB on my machine.
- It records the URL in Safari so you can return to any web page you have ever visited without having to rely on OCR of the address bar, which isn't even displayed anymore most of the time.
I haven't used most of its other features.
Unfortunately, it's been breaking recently as macOS updates. For instance, notification banners no longer show up in the recordings. This actually removes a huge part of the utility for me, as I used to be able to use Rewind to catch notifications I didn't see in time, but that is no longer possible. So now when I see a notification slide away in the corner of my vision, I just have to accept that there's nothing I can do to ever see what it was (most notifications do not go to Notification Center on my machine; not sure why).
Also, Rewind crashes so often that I need to have a script in crontab to automatically restart it.
Thanks for the answer. Have you tried building your own solution? Seems like some others have [0], would be interesting to hear what you think of them.
I'm similarly thinking of making a fully local granola competitor just for personal use as I also like having everything on my own machine too.
Yes. The issue with Meta glasses and those pendants are that they are designed for concealment, designed to invade the privacy of other people.
Some might argue that mobile phones can also be used to make secret recordings. However, they are not primarily designed for this and it is a side-effect of being a multifunctional tool. However, whenever anyone uses Meta glasses or their pendants in public, one should assume that they may behave maliciously and take appropriate action against such ppeople. Those people will only learn if we collectively decide that punching and breaking their stupid glasses is the right way to handle this.
You say the wrong thing, wear the wrong thing, look disheveled or whatever and the asshole with the KGB glasses records it. Then MoistCunt (always forget the real name) on Twitch makes a "reaction video" and 35 million of his dumb minions hate you forever if you dare to appear on the Internet.