"Messaging is a modern version of the social graph"<p>"The company that controls the messaging platform will control the future of the way we interact with people and, quite possibly, with businesses"<p>"The growth team is the equivalent of Facebook’s Navy SEALs"<p>The entire section about privacy.<p>I know it's Wired but this article isn't even a puff piece, it's reads like it's straight from Facebook marketing or a spoof of marketroid buzzwords. Am I alone in finding its tone gross? I've seen better journalism in "sponsored content" on buzzfeed.
This is less about THE future of FB rather than a bet on ONE possible outcome - transaction monetization on a many-to-many network, vs continued growth of their highly targeted advertising product.<p>On the internet just like in real life, someone has to be selling something to somebody.<p>When you're a "free" service (e.g. your users are your product), you can either facilitate transactions and take a cut (e.g. payments, in-app upgrades/stickers/etc), or you can direct the user firehose to someone (advertising, B2B services, data, etc). Facebook has predominantly been successful up until now doing the latter.<p>Messenger is a both a hedge against declining app/website engagement numbers and continued bottoming out of CPM/CPC for digital ads, as well as a bet on a Westernized version of WeChat and LINE have done, particularly in payments.
I hope that this is just a reporter getting carried away with his subject, and not an indication of what our civilization has come to:<p><i>[...] When Despicable Me 2 came out in theaters last year, Facebook worked up a partnership that let users download Minion stickers. It’s easy to imagine a future strategy for making money off stickers.<p>Marcus has even grander ambitions. [...]</i>
I agree that messaging is a hugely important aspect for the future of Facebook, but I wouldn't say that FB's entire future is dependent on messaging. The article's title, with its use of "entrusted its future" seems to imply more than what's really at stake.<p>I would argue that virtual reality (with Oculus) or even the core social network base product is more important to facebook's future than messaging. Sure messaging is important, but it's becoming more and more of a commodity.<p>At the end of the day, I think facebook has currently entrusted its future to Zuckerberg and not the CEO of PayPal.
I thought it was perversely amusing that when Facebook's mobile app was finally usable, they went ahead and got themselves into a power struggle with their users by trying to force standalone messaging on them. I ended up deleting the Facebook app entirely and went back to using the web site. Whenever I've brought this up in a group of friends, I've found I'm not the only one to get that bright idea.<p>I wonder how many millions of users they got to delete their main app with this move.
Seems like Facebook is in the "we have to control this market or we'll lose relevance" stage now. Almost nothing about a mission. Helping people share their emotions I guess. And some hand wavy stuff about reliability. But messenger just seems like a land grab. It doesn't seem like messenger solves any important new problems.
Learnt a lot about Messenger's features from this article, even though I use it prob once-a-week.. seems they haven't done that great a job teaching users / onboarding them to new functionality. Feel like that would be right up the Growth team's alley
was this article setup and paid for by FB?
(<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html</a>)
I understand why the piece has the title that it does - Messenger is considered - both internally and externally - as a critical piece of Facebook's roadmap. But man is it hyperbolic to imply that a company with the ads engine of Facebook's future is entirely dependent on an unfinished messaging product.