According to TechCrunch, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote codes for the latest mobile IM application : Poke, the tone played when receiving push notifications is from the mouth of Zuckerberg. This approach reflects the way pursued by Zuckerberg : hacker way.
As one of the earliest features of Facebook the "Poking" is invented by Zuckerberg, it is not surprising that Zuckerberg involves in Poke's development.
Zuckerberg recorded his own voice on the phone initially just for fun. But he was later successfully persuaded to filter the voice and made it notification tone of Poke.
The entire development process of Poke fully reflects Facebook's "hacker way", it also sends a certain message to Facebook's potential competitors as well as people interested in joining the company. Previously, Facebook found that Snapchat was very popular. The obvious difference between Snapchat and Instagram is that when user shares photo on Snapchat, user can set the photo display time (10 seconds), once the countdown ended, this photo will disappear without a trace.
Facebook wanted to acquire Snapchat previously, but the latter refused to accept it because they wanted to remain independent. So Facebook and Zuckerberg entered the "hacker way". Because there were only a few weeks left before Apple stopped receiving applications for new applications before Christmas, they must develop applications similar to Snapchat in a short time.
Facebook product director Blake Ross and his team began to race against time, Zuckerberg involved in programming, designer Mike Matas and Sharon Hwang designed Poke icon, Facebook also set a deadline. With the joint efforts, Facebook finally launched Poke in the morning of the 21st Dec.
Why did Ross publicly announce its team developed this application within 12 days on Facebook? The industry believes that Facebook may intend to show that if Facebook wants to do one thing, it will finally achieve it. At the same time, it also wants to warn competitors, if they do not join Facebook, then Facebook will clone their applications and compete with them.
The development process of Poke conveys a message to top engineers, designers and product planners : Facebook is not a bureaucracy. But if Facebook clones those applications which are not willing to be acquired, will this kill the innovation of other applications? Since Facebook can use its big user base to attract more users in a short period of time, which will threatens other applications' growth and their innovations. This may also lead to dominance. This is similar to what happens in China's Tencent in some way. Hope this situation will not continue in the future.
Source : http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/m/2012-12-24/09067915585.shtml
