It seems like there are three obvious divisions of the Facebook product:<p>- Chat<p>- Shared content (news feed/photos/etc)<p>- Events<p>I wonder what the world looks like in which each is treated as a separate product with a common login. I imagine that the size of the user base goes up, but total usage could go down.<p>I know many people who don't have Facebook because they don't like the constant distraction of its shared content core, but would be open to using it for chat and events (if only because everyone else is). At the same time, there are probably existing users who haven't abandoned it yet because of events/chat, but would like to be less distracted by the content stream. If someone could install only Messenger and Events, effectively opting into those two products and out of Paper, it's not hard to imagine a sizable subset of the Facebook population doing exactly that.
On the contrary, I think this is about FaceBook knowing exactly what the future holds.<p>- FB probably recognizes that a Social Network is at its core a directory of connections and the ability to message/talk to each other. Until now it took a backseat to over-shared content, when it should have been the other way round.<p>- This app could serve as the foundation for the next FaceBook. Once you strip down an app to its essentials, you can very carefully add features based on data and the lessons learned.<p>- We are moving towards more selective, opt-in types of engagement, as opposed to carpet bombing with the content feed. For example, there are only a couple of dozen people whose feeds I care about. Those are most likely the people who I interact with or message often. What I want is the ability to mark certain people as "interesting" so that I see their statuses, instead of having to "hide" everybody else. (add:) Same with groups, follows etc.
I think they may have finally found their path to irrelevance. I used to go to Facebook (the website) everyday, multiple times a day. They changed it for worse with every update, so I dropped the site and started using the app, but even the app kept changing for the worse and it's now a total mess. Then this morning I realized that it's been a week since I last used Facebook, and I'm pretty sure that in a couple months I'll be ready to drop it completely.
Disclaimer: ex-Facebooker.<p>> Similarly, there’s a logic to giving Paper some more features, or “bloat,” as engineers derisively call such additions. Although it’s awkward to cram more information into a hidden tab on Paper — if birthdays are so important, why aren’t they in Paper’s main news feed? — the additional information also helps Paper live up to its billing as a place for news and stories from your social graph. For some people, birthdays and invitations are a vital part of that news stream, even if, for others, such information is trivial or better placed in the core Facebook app.<p>1. The Events and Birthday features were planned before Paper was announced. It's not feature bloat, it's a "second release" feature planned ahead of time.<p>2. Paper is optimized for a high-quality reading experience, especially longer content, as evidenced by the meticulous attention to detail in the text rendering and the horizontal scrolling. Birthdays would take up a lot of space in the story stream for relatively little content (and how would you order it within the feed, anyway?). Look at the birthday indicator on Facebook WWW, and tell me a name and three words are worth a screen-sized card in the stream. I would be very skeptical.<p>3. Birthdays arrive regularly and in chronological order. The Notifications jewel is the best place for these things - people also visit it regularly and there's a chronological ordering to it.<p>As for Nearby, the argument is flimsy. Changing strategy doesn't have to mean sabotaging in-flight development. Perhaps Nearby was developed before or during planning for the shift to the new strategy.
I like that they've done with Messenger. All they did was make an app specifically designed for messaging and remove the bolted on version from the main app. You shouldn't notice any UX differences once you install the new Messenger app thanks to the wonders of deeplinking.
To be honest, once Facebook strips the messenger app from the main app I'm done using Facebook. I don't want to agree to the new terms and conditions.
If Facebook strips the ability to message from the main app, I will no longer use Facebook for messaging. As an adroid user, Google's Hangouts is way better at connecting my gchat and sms and I will then have no use for another standalone messaging app.
In my view Facebook separating out Chat from its core Facebook app was a brilliant move. It simplifies its core UI, yes, but even more makes the integration of WhatsApp into something that might actually make sense. Imagine WhatsApp built into the FB chat app... That's a huge, extremely active user base.<p>Lastly, if the worst happens and the core FB popularity declines, this new app could live a VERY long time. The only thing close in competition is GChat, but considering how popular WhatsApp is and its powerful reach into mobile, this could be the dominant chat platform going forward.
They actually don't want to do anything with them. And I don't even get, how they would keep grabbing their rivals without triggering anti-trust investigation.<p>As soon as any social startup rises to the sky, they would grab it. Since the social itself is worthless in terms of making money, so anyone would easily get acquired, because they don't have any other choice, and definitely acquisition by Facebook, Apple, Google or Microsoft is and was their only business model.
Bundling information and bundling of functionality are being mixed up with this article. Facebook doesn't care about bundling information differently between apps, they care about narrowly designed functionality for each app.
Who knows. In their dataware house all they need is email id to link data from different apps to have a great knowledge about you and send more targeted ads.
Man, why the heck are they trying to split everything off into their own apps? If I am using the main app to browse my feed and I get a message, why the heck do I want to swap to another app to answer it?