Congratulations Facebook!
November 16th, 2010 by Alan Chung · comments · http://blog.zenbe.com/lswvwYou may have heard this week that Facebook is launching a new unified messaging product. We here at Zenbe are happy to have played a small role in this: a few months ago, three of our engineers joined Facebook as part of a talent acquisition. We believe that messaging and collaboration on the web are on the cusp of a new wave of innovation, and we¹re excited to be playing a role in that.
Following the acquisition, Zenbe has begun an exciting new chapter—building more focused products designed around sharing real experiences with the people who matter most in our lives. Like Facebook, we believe context is at the heart of the way real people communicate.
Blacktop is a good example of this approach—it lets users visualize their check-ins in the context of a “trip”, so they can share a complete story of a vacation, a day trip or a night out. We’ve really enjoyed working with the Facebook Places team as an early beta partner, and are excited to dig deeper into the intersection between location and messaging.
We’re currently working on a new app, Shindig, which also uses the power of the Facebook Social Graph to let people share photos with their real friends, in real time, in real locations. But we’ll save the details for another blog post soon.
For now, we want to reiterate our congratulations to the Facebook Messages team, and in particular, the Zenbe alums who helped build it.
[...] York startup Zenbe announced Tuesday that Facebook had acquired its email product, along with three engineers. Zenbe shut down [...]
[...] ago, three of our engineers joined Facebook as part of a talent acquisition,” Zenbe said in a statement on its blog. “We believe that messaging and collaboration on the web are on the cusp of a new wave of [...]
[...] it all makes some sense.CEO Alan Chung discussed the new Facebook messaging product on the official Zenbe blog, noting, “we here at Zenbe are happy to have played a small role in this: a few months ago, [...]
I dont understand, with all this bad press hovering over zenbe in the past few months what will be your core product ? It seems like your company has been taking beating after beating. Maybe you are your own worse enemy ?
And while I can sympothise with users of your mail product I don’t agree its a good idea to bash a good company that is doing good things.
Jason,
I’m not sure what you mean by “bad press”. In the last six months, we did the Facebook deal, released a major update to Lists, including an iPad version (which got a great reviews of that on Gizmodo and elsewhere), and released an awesome new app, Blacktop—which so far has gotten great reviews. There’s been a lot of change and we’ve been really busy, but it was also exciting and energizing.
Of course it was hard to shut down Mail, and we wished we could’ve been less mysterious and announced the Facebook acquisition at the time. Of course, some users that were upset about the shutdown. Email is a very personal product, and we took it as a measure of great success that we made something that mattered to people.
But, on balance, this has all been extremely positive for us, and we’re excited about Blacktop, Shindig, and whatever else the future may hold.
Thats 2010 for yah. I read something very Real the other day. About modern day Tech. It doesnt matter if your product is good, great, or Reliable its that you do it better than everyone else. Facebook being the 800lb Gorilla right about now, will either buy what it can use to Boost its DataMining and Sales, or Swallow up the competition to keep it from taking shots over its bow. Since the Microsoft Business Model hit the streets in the 90s…The objective is not about Customer Service, or whether you can rely on there product, or if its even better than the Next guys. Its a matter of Can they SELL it to you…Take it from Microsoft that hasn’t released a SINGLE Product since the early 90s that wasnt full of Bugs…THEY NEED auto update, just to update the 2.8billion copies of there software in the wild that where Released as ALPHA for there customers to Pay for and Debug for them.
An ISP about 9months ago, lost there hooks to a 3rd party WebMail, I had 4 accounts on it. I Recommended 100 other Companies to them, but thank GOD routed the mail instead of WebMail.
They could NOT Recover the Address Books for my accounts.
Zenbe isn’t at fault,for being swallowed up…
Stockholders and Investors in Todays Technology are to blame.
They are the only ones that actually make a Return anymore.
I dont even know Zenbe Soft, but I stumbled on it looking for the Messaging,Goup Component. Great minds, Good Forethinking will Help them come up with the Next Best Thing.
Maybe they will Build the Next Facebook 8-), where WE as Users, and HUMANS control our Information…
by the way! cool service! wish i heard of it sooner
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