Why Facebook Has Entrusted Its Future to the CEO of PayPal | Hacker News Reader

Why Facebook Has Entrusted Its Future to the CEO of PayPal

wired.com

67 pointsdavidiach25 comments

"Messaging is a modern version of the social graph"

"The company that controls the messaging platform will control the future of the way we interact with people and, quite possibly, with businesses"

"The growth team is the equivalent of Facebook’s Navy SEALs"

The entire section about privacy.

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.

It's breathless reporter-speak, and it's often not actually intentional or conscious. Many reporters truly believe they are uncovering Woodward and Bernstein level stuff every time they hit "publish".

I was thinking something similar. I get the whole 'Soul of a New Machine' vibe they were going for but it felt like talking about where in the Hall of Fame a rookie player is going to be[1], which is to say "Great, you made some changes, you pushed in a lot of traffic, now in a year or so we'll be able to evaluate how well you did. Declaring victory this early is potentially quite damaging to the future evaluation."

Except that I presume the Wired folks feel like if they called it you will remember them as being 'the journalists that broke this huge story' and if the future turns out much more ho-humm than that, well you won't remember this article anyway :-)

[1] - Tracey Kidder's "developers and managers as superheros book."

I was going to complain about that as well but will just say it's pretty impressive PR work. ("I'm not even mad, I'm impressed!" -Ron Burgundy)

Though a lot of people seem to love Wired(I used to read their magazine, back when those were a thing, and they did have some really nice layouts), for a while now their articles have been shameless, overhyping, clickbait. Every single headline is THIS IS GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD/BE THE NEXT BIG THING/MAKE X ESTABLISHED THING OBSOLETE, and it turns out to be a whole lot of nothing.

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.

On the internet just like in real life, someone has to be selling something to somebody.

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.

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:

[...] 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.

Marcus has even grander ambitions. [...]

LINE is a VERY popular messaging app in Japan, makes heaps of cash by selling sticker packs that people can use as large emoticons.

(not just Japan; Taiwan and Thailand as well, and quite probably other countries as well).

In other words, it is an indication of what our civilization has come to...

Is that "an Asian" thing, though? Ie do people in US/Europe spend much money on stickers?

Not sure, never used a "US/European" chat-app or if they have the options.

However, going on the history of "pay 99p for a new ringtone" craze before smartphones became prevalent. I am willing to say stickers will work the world over.

I'm not sure you understand how much people love stickers and personalization in general.

Yeah, but it's not like there aren't a lot of companies already out there making personalized stickers. There are many of them.

A marginal innovation in sticker-making is something interesting for Sticker Makers Quarterly; not the flagship magazine for thinkfluential technological super-innovation.

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.

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.

At the end of the day, I think facebook has currently entrusted its future to Zuckerberg and not the CEO of PayPal.

The younger generation isn't bothering with Facebook as much (today's teens to early 20s) and going right to services that offer messaging and image sharing, maybe that's what the article is referring to.

Where are you getting these stats from? Would love to see sources.

You mean like WhatsApp?

Yes. The 13-year-olds are all over that shit, it's mind boggling. I became aware of this recently when I found out my niece's class has a WhatsApp group and it's their shared space, like a permanent party in there. After seeing that, I realized FB in comparison seems static, linear and (blasphemy) positively clean and well organized.

As a 30+ i find it funny that chat rooms are making a come back. I used IRC (and still use) back in the day, and the funky flash and java chat rooms that a lot of mainstream websites used to host to build their communities.

WhatsApp always appealed more than Facebook because it is much more like a chat room.

What goes around comes around as they say.

It also highlights just how terribly Microsoft fumbled with MSN Messenger. They had hundreds of millions of active users and just sort of pissed it all away. MS could have launched a social network just with Messenger to generate the graph and whatnot. They sorta did something, but it was a confusing experience IIRC. Then after they lose their users to Skype, they buy Skype and repeat the process, it seems. (The Skype client hasn't gotten much better and I've not seen anything interesting come out of the purchase.)

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.

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? (http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

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.

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