Facebook owning mobile? Not hardly. They have users not because of the quality of their mobile experience. Their main app is still a POS. And, they still seem to have an aversion to native development -- their React "native" play is just a rehash of their earlier HTML 5 experiment. The purchased expertise from Instagram, etc is helping, but they are buying users, not necessarily earning them by creating a superior mobile product. The messenger spin off had minimal purpose except to annoy me. I get message notification on the main app, yet I have to open another app to read them? Who thought that was a good idea? It is almost at the same level of annoyance as the Foursquare spinoff of Swarm. Yes, FB kills it when it comes to users, however the cable companies have a lot of users too; that doesn't mean they're awesome. Financially Facebook might be doing really well, but that doesn't necessarily make them some kind of guru when it comes to mobile. When I think "awesome mobile experience," Facebook isn't what comes immediately to mind.
He lost me when he said<p>"They will add Apps to directly compete with Google, like maps, email, and productivity (think: Evernote). As well as cloud storage."<p>Did we already forget the fail that was FB email?
They seem to trying suck up a significant proportion of Android and iOS devs in the London area. They are producing lots of interesting libraries too, shame they are Facebook.
I've noticed a lot of friends are starting to Facebook message rather than text. You get read receipts, and replies are faster. (I'm in Canada)
FB Messenger used to be a part of Facebook. They broke it out into a separate app. According to the author, the mere act of breaking it out suddenly gains Facebook an extra 500 million active monthly users. How does that make any sense? Splitting one app into two doesn't make it worth any more, and double-counting the users seems completely pointless.
"FB will give Snapchat $20b, 30b, and 40b offers over the next two years. 50-50 they get Evan to sell.
"<p>Does anyone else here think a 40B dollar offer for snapchat is kinda, lets say, out of the realm of possibilities?
<i>Now, I would say Twitter’s users are worth 2-5x as much as the average FB users because the product is just much more “upscale.”</i><p>What a strange claim.<p>As an aside, recently the Facebook app (at least on Android) embedded its own web browser, so instead of going to Chrome when you followed a web link, it would open in the Facebook app. You can reconfigure it to use the external browser, but the power of defaults mean many won't.<p>This seemingly small change has a big impact because if you open a link you want to share, the Facebook app restricts you to sharing it via your wall, versus the traditional Android app where you might share it over hangouts, Google+, email, etc.