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I can’t think of another company I’d want less to know my transaction and purchase history than FB/Meta. What happened to Zuckerberg’s shift to “video” or are they truly throwing anything and everything at the wall now?

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E-commerce (mostly for IG) and payments (mostly for WA, somewhat for Messenger) have been parts of the Facebook bull case for a long time. Why do people think companies of >70k people can't focus on more than one product/service? Not you in particular, just generally, I spend more time than I'd like to admit on "fin-Twit" and people expect FB has suddenly buried every plan aside of VR since they rebranded. I would say however the spaghetti analogy is a bit dismissive considering that, when their projects do "stick to the wall", they spawn business-lines with 10 digit users.

Not that I have any objection to the hive mind thinking Reels and VR is the end-all be-all, I want it to think it's a dead business.

Isn’t this because in China some chat and payments app is absolutely massive, WePay I believe?

Edit: It’s WeChat. The SV giants are chasing the ubiquity that app enjoys.

I figured I'd point out why you're (probably) being downvoted in case you don't understand. The problem of payments is obvious, it's literally ancient. It's a ridiculous and naive statement that anyone would have to look at WeChat to realize it's a valuable problem to solve.

WeChat Pay (Tencent) and AliPay (Alibaba) are both huge indeed. I have no clue how much cash they bring in, tho I would expect Visa and Mastercard make way more, but they are widely used, especially the former (WeChat is quite the super-app in China)

The reason why they would want this, in my interpretation anyway, is that there is a lot of product fit to have payments on WhatsApp. The app is widely used outside NA as the communication channel, namely by lots of SMBs that actively use it (see [0], that app is solely used for business owners as it's rather useless for a regular WA user). The monetizing opportunities on WA are deeply tied to SMBs, basically you should be able to operate a business on WA in which case you shouldn't have to go off-app once you get to payment, removing payment-middlemen is probably in the interest of all three parties involved too. Payments are necessary to enable "business over chat", you can also see them working on this with Click-to-WhatsApp/Click-to-Messenger ads and the acquisition of Kustomer. This is all valid for Messenger as well but I think that's more of a TBD, it's yet to prove itself popular for that kind of usage, tho there is a good fit for Marketplace and to compete with Venmo. It's also implemented on Facebook and Instagram for their respective Shops platforms, I don't think there's more to it than that for those.

Just like Apple Pay is a rounding error[1], I wouldn't bet on payments being a significant cash cow, not any time soon anyway, considering Facebook's approach to monetization. IMO it's more about deepening the moat and broadening the utility of the apps, especially WhatsApp as it tries to become something of a communication+commerce+payments super-app for Asia/Latam/Africa (credit cards and phone numbers would be rough to displace in North America and Europe, I sure as hell wouldn't bet on FB overtaking those). A Signal or a Telegram could take over a chatting app (if it somehow reaches, like, 2B people), it would be much harder (as if it wasn't hard enough to beat such a network effect) to take over a chatting app with a built-in suite of features for businesses and a user base that gets accustomed to commercial use of said app.

I could also be entirely wrong, I'm just an idiot that tries to follow the company.

0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1276030/whatsapp-busines...

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1060577/apple-pay-revenu...

Financial bloat and dependency creep. "5% discounts for loyal users" situations. No thanks

"Why do people think companies of >70k people can't focus on more than one product/service?"

Because Facebook's core product is failing, and they should have all hands on deck to try to save it.

That's exactly it though. You can't expect core Facebook to stop failing by throwing 70k employees at the problem.

My feed is full of former groups being overrun with blogspam. I've noticed it spiking in the last 3-6 months. That type of thing needs armies of people, and... well, facebook doesn't care.

Like the pre-google (well, and google search as of now) search engines, being overrun by spam signaled the end of the viability of the product. Either they don't have the resources to defend it, or they don't care. Reason doesn't matter.

Facebook's core product has almost 3 billion monthly active users, that is not "failing" by any logical definition.

With some 400 million fake Facebook users deleted … monthly.

So, because Q1 guidance is a meager 3-10% revenue increase YoY and RoW active users took one (and first) small step back it is failing?

I agree.

The terrible thing is is that it's the easiest solution for me and my friend group to send money via Messenger.

The US has _really_ dropped the ball on any sort of easy-to-use, standardized money transfer. Zelle is the closest thing and it is a joke for every day usability.

US instant payments drop in 2023. Definitely sucks it took this long, but it’ll be ubiquitous and replaces ACH.

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....

Sounds promising but I will believe it when I see it (and use it).

since we are talking consumers here, what would it look like to a regular user? would I have to walk around asking people for their account numbers and routing numbers to FedNow them the money?

It will eventually support aliases (like Zelle does) as well as cross border payments, but my understanding is that it won’t at launch (as the desire is to get the ACH delays gone first). I don’t have consumer UX insight, only into the ISO20022 message plumbing (user->institution->Fed->institution->user).

In Australia the system is called Osko and we link our mobile phone numbers or email address to it.

I use this to find out who owns a mobile number.

Punch in the mobile number to the banking app and more often than not the mobile's owner name is displayed.

That's definitely a down side to it. I think you used to be able to choose your username, but now the only options my bank gives me are name + surname, first initial + surname or, oddly, middle name + surname

People do this type of lookup today with Cashapp

If it’s anything like Canada’s INTERAC e-transfers, you ask for the person’s email address; they receive an email bouncing them to a SAML sign-on portal with support for all major banks, which lets them use their bank to SSO into the payment system; and then the payment system uses the SSO-reflected banking details as the destination for depositing the money.

INTERAC now lets you set up auto deposit - simply go to your bank’s online banking portal and register your email and from then on any incoming transactions go to whatever account you chose. Very handy! No more “security questions”

They’re also rolling out support for phone numbers as identifiers in addition to email addresses but my bank doesn’t seem to support sending to phone numbers (or registering mine as auto deposit) yet.

In the UK (and I believe all of Europe), the system is indeed based on bank account numbers and sort codes, but popular banking apps like Monzo will do WhatsApp-style contact lists, where banking details of your phone contacts are synced and you can just pick them from the list (note: account number are not considered secret sensitive information). Banking apps will usually save someone’s details for future usage.

In India, we have UPI and other forms of instant transaction system (all of them are free in any decent bank, I believe).

With UPI, you can connect your bank account (no matter which bank it is) with any UPI based payment app and create IDs which can be shared for receiving or requesting payments. (These IDs are unique on basis of both app and bank).

So I can connect my bank account to gpay and create a new ID. Send them to others who are using gpay or any other UPI app (bank apps also have UPI functionality built in). They can send the payment to the ID (which will be automatically added to my bank). This is instant.

It can also be used for requesting payment by others and I can accept or decline the request.

Alternatively, phone numbers can also be used to fetch the IDs a person has if you have enabled it (it's by default)

If it's anything like in the EU (more specific: SEPA-Zone) then in 2027 you can meaningfully use it.

Funny, never had a problem with it, even across countries

How will this impact things like Venmo or Apple Pay, both of which currently charge some % for instant transfer to your checking account.

Personal opinion: significantly. FedNow instant payments are a penny for up to $100k transfers, with the eventual plan to support up to $500k transfers.

I don't see how it would impact Apple Pay, for example. In Australia, we have instant payments already, and Apple/Google/Samsung Pay is used alongside it - completely separate.

What if someone don't use Messenger? Venmo/Paypal are still the most popular options in my circles, largely because they are not tied to any specific platform.

It says it works across WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. What are the chances of someone having none of those?

We do exist! Never had WhatsApp or instagram, deleted Facebook more than a decade ago.

100% for me!

I'm a 100%, and so's my wife.

Since they're all owned by a company with an extremely polarizing public opinion, I imagine the reasons someone might not use one of them would likely double as reasons not to use the others, either.

> Zelle is the closest thing and it is a joke for every day usability.

I am randomly banned from Zelle for no particular reason. AML misfire, I guess. They won't tell me.

I feel like cashapp, PayPal, and venmo work pretty well

Facebook doesn't sell your information outright, Credit Card companies do.

Facebook selling my data doesn't concern me.

Facebook having another set of datapoints on my personal life does.

But that is irrational. Selling data is worst possible thing a company can do, because anyone can buy the data including Facebook.

They want to monetize the Facebook mommy groups and similar that basically destroyed Craigslist.

I’m surprised it took this long.

"Your Pay Balance was $500 but you shared a spicy meme so it is now $0."

fakebook is a worse offender when it comes to data collection

Ignorance is bliss?

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