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RajT88 5 hours ago

It is like musical one hit wonders, but for software.

Some dumb idea which just hits at the right moment and makes a bunch of money.

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tartoran 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Does anyone remember the Iphone IFart app that was sold for $1 million?

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zooweemama 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Probably not because it never happened. They did try to sell it though.

	▲	matsemann 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The person that got the top spot for "flashlight" in the app store back in the days made about $600k on it before apple made it a built in function. Just copied existing apps and got lucky. https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/92ybl/erik-ble-app-millionaer-de...

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fantasizr 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

it's the AI wave of the original viral app store apps like "Yo" and "I am Rich".

	▲	songshu an hour ago \| parent [-]
		To this day I swear I want Yo. I’d use it daily.

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shadowgovt 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In this case in particular it looks like an acquihire.

Meta just saw two engineers actually execute on the joke about "building Facebook in a weekend" except that it then really took off in its target niche and generated a ton of press.

I don't doubt that they're interested in the AI aspect, but I suspect that a significant contributor was that they demonstrated competence right in the middle of Meta's wheelhouse so why not just grab these guys?

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entropicdrifter 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It's also part of their longer-term trend of buying or burying any company that starts to get any press as a social media site of note outside of major players where that hasn't been an option.

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Marsymars 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This is really it. At Meta's scale, even if it's an long-shot for a competitor to hurt them, it's worth turning those low odds into zero odds.

	▲	alex1138 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yet Zuck can somehow argue with a straight face FB has competition (apparently they straight up used to delete links to competitors like Google+ at the time, and also the constant copying of Snapchat) and Hacker News can split hairs over trivial definitions like "wdym fb no competition? email exists" or whatever

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ohyoutravel 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Those “early” ai generated avatars created from you sending in a handful of your own photos. Absolutely printed money, hit right as mildly technical people could use the tech + the tech was developed enough, but before normal people could easily do it.