Dozens of cool utilities like this are created every week and launched at Show HN, but without "Facebook" in their names you need at least 10 of them to get the many points this thread has gathered.
Same goes for Google, but you could argue that it's for a reason. FB/Google have a reputation to uphold and they strive to make sure their name isn't associated with subpar stuff. Plus, they have a lot of brilliant developers to work on this stuff. In the end of the day, it's largely about knowing which of these cool utilities have a better chance of being usable and well thought-out, as nobody wants to spend time on figuring out a utility which turns out to be unusable.
> FB/Google have a reputation to uphold and they strive to make sure their name isn't associated with subpar stuff. Plus, they have a lot of brilliant developers to work on this stuff.
Why do you think so? My experience was quite the opposite...
One can argue that large companies don't care about their reputation as much as small companies and individuals do as responsibility gets diluted among the larger number of people. This was certainly the case with most of the tech companies.
Not the parent, but it's mostly because open sourced tools from larger companies were usually built internally to solve a pain point. Of course they wouldn't want it to be subpar and affect their efficiency.
> Large companies don't care about their reputation as much as small companies and individuals do as responsibility gets diluted among the larger number of people. This was certainly the case with most of the tech companies.
I think this speaks more about that particular engineer's ownership of the project rather than company itself.
> FB/Google have a reputation to uphold and they strive to make sure their name isn't associated with subpar stuff.
Have you seen the "google" group/whatever it's called on Github? A lot of the repos that are posted here have large disclaimers, or here in the comments, that the project is not associated with Google itself but rather by the particular employees that are working on it. So Google doesn't mind letting their employees put up repos of their misc "scratch their itch"/side-project/pet projects, it seems.
> Plus, they have a lot of brilliant developers to work on this stuff.
Someone works at Google/Facebook/... -> commence reflex fawning.
