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> For Messenger, I think differentiation is extremely important and something we haven't focused on yet. We've spent the past 6-12 months catching up to WhatsApp and competitors on table stakes like performance, reliability, pushability, etc. This work isn't done and we will continue to do it, including catching up in areas like groups.
> But to get people to ditch WhatsApp and switch to Messenger, it will never be sufficient to be 10% better than them or add fun gimmicks on any existing attribute or feature. We will have to offer some new fundamental use case that becomes important to people's daily lives.
They never did catch up on table stakes, nor did they discover that new fundamental use case. But they had a good fallback plan: Just buy WhatsUp.
Bummer for the users, though.
I find myself wishing something along the lines of antitrust was enforced more rigorously to help preserve competition.
And yet their purchase of WA shows Zuck's ruthlessness and business genius. He saw his team fail to beat WA, he realized they would never beat them, and he made a decision to buy WA for what was an insane price.
16 billion dollars for a 24(?) person company with no revenue.
I think 99% of executives on earth wouldn't have made that decision. They would have believed their teams that said victory was around the corner, or deluded themselves into thinking success was inevitable, or would have been afraid to demoralize their team, or would have rationalized away why messaging wasn't important after all.
He just acted and won, for what now seems like a bargain.
I think they did, just not in the way they expected. They've developed a messaging platform where finding the user you want to message is handled outside of something as arbitrary and transitory as a phone number.
For example, military members (in the US) rely heavily on FB Messenger because deployments, short tours, and overseas assignments kill the reliability of using a regular phone number to maintain contact with friends and family. Messenger handles that by connecting via Facebook and maintaining that connection regardless of the users' phone numbers or email addresses.
> They never did catch up on table stakes
What didn't they catch up on? To me Messenger seems like a better user experience than WhatsApp or any of the other three messaging clients I need to use.
Indeed WhatsApp is lacking basic functionality like a desktop app. Also, a client tied to a phone number may work well for some people, but a pain whenever you change your number, and it makes discovery of people much harder.
I know everyone else in the west seems to use WhatsApp but in my social circle I connect to nearly everyone via FB Messenger. I have but don't use WhatsApp. I have no idea what it provides that FB Messenger doesn't provide and better. I don't need a phone number for FB Messenger. I can access it trivially at messenger.com, no need for the crazy QR code non-sense of WhatsApp. I also do not have to give FB Messenger access to my contact list, unlike WhatsApp (maybe that's changed but it used to be required).
>Just buy WhatsUp
I mean you could just tell how unpopular WhatsApp is in the US. I still remember no one in the US have heard of Whatsapp when Facebook announce the 16B acquisition.
But WhatsUp could certainly be another Startup idea.
As far as I can tell, there seems to be a great deal of competition in the messaging app space, in addition to Whatsapp and Messenger, you have Hangouts, Signal, Viber, Telegram, Wire, Skype, Slack, Discord, and of course good old SMS. And these are just off the top of my head.
I would not be surprised if we see more consolidation in the sector.
> They never did catch up on table stakes,
In what sense? The table stakes of boring functionality seem to me to be much better implemented in messenger than whatsapp. Everything from a more intuitive UI to a web option is better done in messenger.
Our of curiosity, what was so hard for FB to have reliability, performance… and what exactly is pushability?
Is it because the whatsapp dudes used Erlang?
Why was it a bummer for the users?
Why was WhatsApp so popular though, wasn't it just another chat app for mobile?
They didn't need to since they bought WhatsApp
> Bummer for the users, though.
The game's not over yet. Maybe Meta sells, or is forced sell, WhatsApp. Or maybe people move on to the new thing.
Bummer for the users?
I'd say Zuckerberg is the clear loser in this story: what could be worse than failing to catch up with WhatsApp and discovering a new fundamental use case?
Failing, then spending an obscene amount of money on buying WhatsApp, then seeing a considerable part of that money enabling the Signal Foundation and watching Signal eat up the user base of both WhatsApp and the Facebook Messenger. Users are fine.
It's telling that Watsup did never "catch up" on performance reliability, and pushability. They started top notch on those, and if anything, moved down a bit with time.
That's because you simply can't catch up on those. It's not something that happens inside the constraints of software development. That's why Facebook didn't.
"Catching up" is even a very weird way to say it. That wording implies Watsup was a huge entrenched company with a lot of resources spent on development, and Facebook was a nimble team that was working hard to add enough development effort to be an equal.
The WhatsApp situation was a huge driver behind Facebook's 2013 acquisition of Onavo.
FB first positioned Onavo as an "Opera Mini"-like data-compressing VPN for people with mobile data caps, later as "Onavo Protect" so they could scare people into installing it with the threat of the big bad open Internet, and lastly as "Facebook Research".
It gave FB five years of passive market research data so they could identify and acquire (or clone) popular new apps before they could grow into WhatsApp-sized competitors. Think of all the Snapchat-like features that appeared in Instagram around this time, for example, after they failed to directly clone Snapchat as "Slingshot".
The data from Onavo was so strategically-important that FB were willing to pay teenagers to install it and burned their Enterprise iOS cert doing so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-acquires-onavo-for-...
I’m curious about this. Is it not possible to buy usage data from other network operators without owning them? As much as I hate it, I’d expect this is sold much like location data is.
Sure, you may not get the raw traffic but that seems not very useful for FB.
Amazing how wrong Mark was about lots of things related to Messenger, and how just two months after this email FB ended up paying 20 billion to buy WhatsApp. You get the sense there was a real paranoia about WhatsApp being an existential threat but now almost a decade later and it's hard to see how FB got a return on that 20 billion investment for that particular acquisition.
Also, I find it particularly interesting how Mark is so focused on pushing everything into the public "news feed" style sphere, and seems to have a kind of wishful thinking involving messaging in particular transitioning from a private activity you do with your friends to this public bombastic twitter-esque landscape of public figures "sending messages" to their followers and removing the barriers between those communications and "real" communications between your actual friends. He seems to intensely believe that this is really the only way to create a giant business - essentially destroying and corrupting personal private connections to fill your experience with "more engaging" public content to keep you addicted to the platform.
Well, especially for chat, that didn't pan out. And now we are entering a period where private stories, private communication, and meaningful communication matters more - Instagram growth falling to single digits and rapidly losing ground to other platforms among younger users (a harbinger of things to come) - Mark's dogmatic commitment to the alter of public newsfeed paradigms has caused almost all his platforms to evolve towards a dying entity one by one - all except for, notably, WhatsApp.
One gets the sense that Mark has one trick, and that trick is no longer effective at meaningfully growing and positioning FB for the future, especially compared to its historical growth rates (maybe those were unsustainable anyway).
Re your first part, WhatsApp could've expanded out into a full social network the same way LINE and WeChat did in Asia. So I think Zuck was onto something
Re: the rest: That's an interesting outlook. I wonder if younger audiences are more resilient to being tricked into trying to compete for "Likes" in a semi-public forum of their friends and family..
> but now almost a decade later and it's hard to see how FB got a return on that 20 billion investment for that particular acquisition.
WhatsApp is the 3rd largest social media platform in the world with 2 billion users. FB today is worth about $400 billion more since buying whatsapp. This is after the recent stock market correction. FB could today sell WhatsApp for a lot more than what they paid for in 2014. Say what you want about zuckerburg, but his purchase of instagram and whatsapp was a big win for him and facebook.
> Mark's dogmatic commitment to the alter of public newsfeed paradigms has caused almost all his platforms to evolve towards a dying entity one by one
Dying? Facebook owns 4 out of the top 7 social media platforms.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
Not only that, many business, governments, schools, etc are locked into facebook platforms.
This was around the era where Snapchat was starting to take off, and I think someone real forward-thinking should have seen the writing on the wall that young people don't want to be doing all of their social interactions in public any more, nor do they want their cringey past coming back to haunt them. They were on Facebook, and then their moms all joined Facebook. They migrated to Instagram, and then Facebook bought it and pushed all the moms there too. Snapchat though, has a couple unique aspects that I think were critical to its success.
First, all the interactions are built around curating who sees it, and keeping things private and temporary. The most public thing you can do is post a story, and that's where you send stuff that even if your mom adds you, you can keep that in mind while sharing to that. But for anything else, you build up a list of people who can see your private story, and send it to that one. And everything that goes to either of those places is gone after 24 hours, which was also not exactly a selling point for the older generation that want to use social media as a scrapbook.
The other thing is that Snapchat is quite unintuitive and confusing to use. I've seen this stated as a criticism, and sure you can make it that, but I think that's also part of the secret sauce that made it so successful. The way you use the app is like its own separate language compared to all social media platforms of the past. And that in itself is enough to keep older people off of it, who had enough trouble trying to figure out Facebook. Plus I think there's some fun and engagement to be had when someone says "hey did you know you can do this?" and you discover a new feature in the app. I've been of the theory that Snapchat keeps itself awkward to use on purpose, because it seems legitimately beneficial to keeping its user base.
Just tried to paste the content of the tweets, but too long so I dropped it in pastebin for anyways who's interested.
My takeaway from this entire post is that Twitter is not appropriate for long essays and people need to stop acting like it is.
I've been a victim of this in the past; it's very easy to excited about the flavour of your own Kool Aid.
Mark getting excited about using a message to book a restaurant seems like a prime example of this.
>"Just like News feed started out as friends content only but eventually expanded to included more content that is now critical to everyday engagement..."
Aged like milk, and not only in the context of the 2016 election.
Friends' generated content was the main reason why I started using Facebook back in '08. Content that showed up on my newsfeed not created directly by friends triggered my - and perhaps many other folks' - leaving the platform.
This is eerie for me to read, especially this line: "If messenger came with Andrea for everyone, that would clearly be amazing for the world."
Eleven months later, FB bought a little startup I was part of to try to build exact this. (Spolier: it flopped)
Interesting to get an more raw insight into Mark's thinking. In some ways its insightful and prescient, but also feels like there is desperation and a kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. I suppose Facebook has/had the resources to do plenty of spaghetti throwing though.
Another observation is that this would have been the moment for Facebook to lean into short video content a la TikTok. But it seems like the video content is just an after thought for Zuck. Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose, but its interesting that they almost got there. Vine already existed at this point and I guess Zuck did not view it as a threat. Perhaps that's one downside of the "defensibility" mindset that seems to pervade this writing and most of the ideas. I get the sense that this is Zuck responding to competitors, and not really crafting a unique vision for Facebook as its own entity.
Reading this fascinating thread makes me finally understand why I left Facebook as a platform - and that's because Facebook ISN'T a platform.
Zuckerberg thinks of Facebook in terms of technology - it's an application platform with certain features like messaging, a news feed, an API and so forth.
That isn't what Facebook was to me. In the beginning, Facebook was a community. As An Application, the problem it solved, that of staying in sync with your community, had many other solutions: Meeting IRL, talking on the phone, going to reunions, and so forth. Facebook was just a convenient virtual place to put those conversations and meetings instead. It felt neat, it felt good to have your community in a digital space.
The reason I left has nothing to do with the features. Facebook is a perfectly FINE application. I cannot point to a single technological flaw with it. The flaw is in the community. Every year since 2016, I have felt that much of the communities that I interacted with are no longer relevant to me, and somehow the old ways of finding community : Reunions, talking on the phone, meeting IRL for events - just feels like a better community somehow.
I am sure Zuck and Team over at Facebook will continue to add new and amazing features to Facebook that make it a better and better platform, application and API every day. But I don't think I will ever go back, because the community that I found and loved there in 2011 died in 2016, and I cannot imagine it ever coming back. When I go online and see some of the ways in which friends have changed - I just cannot imagine wanting to be close to them again.
I have a criticism of Zuckerberg which may seem unfair, but it is what it is. Zuckerberg is very intelligent, and he's a technologist. But he's not a community organizer. He isn't someone who inspires people to come together; he's not a "bringer" as an organizer might say. I don't think Facebook needs more technology. It needs reconciliation and healing of deep and painful divides that were formed over the past decade that mirror a tear in the fabric of our very society - the deep and brewing divisions in values in western society are NOT going to be papered over by an algorithm. If anything, profit maximizing algorithms that create cliques and insular societies that only see what they want to see make the problem WORSE.
Facebook needs a Martin Luther King Jr, not a Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs.
This description by Zuck of Messenger and News Feed in technological terms only reinforces by opinion that I'm never going back.
It’s funny to read this now; I remember a big surge of excitement about Facebook chat bots among organizations. It was going to be a cool new way to engage followers on Facebook: they could message your org as if it were a person, and a bot would immediately handle the most common requests. FB even started putting a little score near the message button on pages for how fast replies happened. (Still there, last I checked.)
The excitement faded pretty quickly once folks realized that it was just a FB chat version of an automated phone menu. We know how popular those are. I don’t think it ever caught on with users, at least among the orgs I’m aware of.
It's interesting that Mark Zuckerberg saw the transition to privacy / private channels back in 2013. From what I remember, sharing to your feed, posting to other people's walls, tagging each other in images, were all still very popular back then. But as Mark Zuckerberg predicted, usage of these features has dropped dramatically (at least from what I've seen).
It feels like the thrust here was to merge the concept of “community engagement” with “messaging”.
Public conversations vs private conversations.
The challenge I see is that users don’t want to mix the two - I imagine a version of “newsfeed meets google reader” (aka twitter) being very different from “messages to macys or my friends”.
The incentive he’s creating for people to move to messenger seems to be “combine everything” vs “focus”, which ultimately failed. Instead it was instagram that propelled that to the detriment of messenger.
I'm wondering if now people like Zuckerberg, for communications like this, instead of email will be using something with auto-delete features to avoid get this messages on the internet in 10 years.
Do you think that on the time of writing he knows that this can be public someday?
This is public because some law force Facebook to give this messages to the government and they publish it? Some recipients leaked it? FB was hacked?
I get some negative feeling on reading this messages that seems to be written as private.
Ideas number 3 and 4 together sound to me like the foundations of a generalised "intent economy": a buyer expresses what they want, and the platform dynamically builds the graph of agents required to fulfill that intent, including quotes, bidding, idea/pitch refinement etc. as necessary. Maybe you just want a burger. Maybe you want a gift for Mother's Day but you have no idea what. Maybe you want a new house designed and built.
I don't think I actually _want_ this (I view Uber-for-everthing as kinda dystopian) but I'm amazed that nobody has made a serious attempt to build this. Uber has one part of the puzzle in their driver-customer connection and order fulfillment platform. Facebook has another in its social graph. Amazon has another in its marketplace and Mechanical Turk. And a thousand other companies have one highly specialised subset of this, like finding and scheduling a couple of tradespeople required to do a job on your home.
I must be missing something that makes it a lot harder than it seems, or that means there's a lot less value there than it looks like on the surface, because why else have none of these huge players decided to go for it?
Seems like few people remember that for a brief period, messenger bots were all the rage in the tech press and a lot of investment money was lit on fire to support them. I suspect most or all of that fervor can be traced back to this email. Concise, visionary... and wrong.
It's a classic example of confusing what's good for business with what's good for consumers, and then getting wrapped up in a story that rationalizes the use case. Messaging is a convenient interface in theory, but in practice it's not.
Zuck talks about opening a specific app to perform a specific action as if it's some terribly onerous process, but consider that most common use cases are the first or second button on an app's home interface. Tap to open, tap to do the action.
Even if it technically takes longer because of load times, it feels shorter because you're doing less work. Two or three taps to complete a task vs. opening messenger (tap), then TYPING what you want and hoping it's parsed correctly. Sounds awful.
Zooming out, this is a microcosm of how we get the labyrinthine user experience of so many popular apps and web sites: Executives suppose they know where the future of their business is, then insist the UX be built around that (instead of how or why people actually engage).
Note that Zuck's analysis here isn't based on any data whatsoever - it's purely "here's what I think the future of this business is," and then the entire company pivots around it. Is it all bad? No, having some kind of vision isn't bad. But... This is one of those areas where we can point to someone like Steve Jobs and say, at least he generally focused on the end-user experience and worked towards building the right product; FB/Meta's business-first consumer-later approach is backwards.
It might seem at first like it's framed as being about the consumer experience, but if you pay close attention the primary questions answered are: What can we do to increase engagement on the platform? And: What might others do to drive engagement that we can do first?
Wait a minute, what might others do that we can do first? That sounds like... playing defense. Except, the others haven't done it yet, so it's speculative proactive defense, which is something just about any startup advisor would caution against.
But FB/Meta is at the point where they're focused on market share above all else, so decisions are being made from this backwards second-guessing defensive position. And because so many of us are already locked into the ecosystem, we're experiencing the consequences.
I find it strange that Facebook communicates across the company... using Facebook. It doesn't seem like a medium well suited for that.
innovation and differentiation are not things i need or want in my messaging app, holy cow, i just want to send messages. use a standard protocol or write a new one, i don't care, but the problem you are solving is SENDING MESSAGES TO A KNOWN USER. write a protocol, document it, and let the client handle the rest. omg. grow up
What's interesting about this to me, is how many times he refers to the user wanting to go one way, namely private and uninterrupted, and him continuing to drag the user back into the public, data-mining open. He and the lot are creeps. These platforms pretend like they're social services first that mine usage to keep the lights on, when in fact they're data-mining services first, baiting users into engaging in a public forum so they have more data to mine. It's lame and super average, vanilla, capitalist bs.
It's wild how much of this long post is just about addressing potential concerns about spam. I remember how annoying early Facebook News Feed was with Farmville, but it sounds like this was a recurring problem for them that they had to constantly pay attention to.
These are all great ideas. Why didn’t they implement many of these inside Messenger or WhatsApp?
I also wonder why Meta suddenly lost their competitive spirit in Messaging space. WA is so behind compared to WeChat/Line/Kakao.
> "[...] if we had gotten the quality balance right and not repeatedly thrashed our ecosystem [...]"
I'm choosing to believe even in 2013 this was referring to Google's messaging strategy.
I loved it when Facebook released the Messenger app, because I could occasionally install Facebook to post vacation pics without ever installing Messenger. I've still never used Messenger.
Given tiktok's growth, these old words are barely meaningful...
I was confused for a second, I thought this was the time he said everyone who gives Facebook their data were "dumb fucks" That was a different story
https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...
I think a lot of tech companies / products at tech companies, (e.g. Netflix, YouTube, Messenger) fundamentally get one thing wrong. They don't "value" the user's time and drive for *maximum* engagement. Maybe the problem is that there's a new sucker born everyday, but I despise using Netflix and YouTube, and I use them only because I have to.
With Messenger specifically, I absolutely don't want to spend quality time with someone communicating over a digital device. I'd much rather just use it to make plans with the person I want to hang out with.
And when I am making plans to spend time with a significant other, if I made a request to a service for "buying two tickets for hunger games at 9pm" and it returned a message saying "I can get you two tickets for shoreline at 9:10pm", I'd want to throw my phone into the ocean. I'd feel differently if I said "buy two tickets to any movie at 9pm", that'd be a completely different story.
This is the same problem with YouTube. If you've recently subscribed to a user, or watched one of their videos for the first time, and then make a search for something completely different, one of a first few results will be a video of the user you initially interacted with. It is SUCH a bonkers user experience for me and I want to never give YouTube any information about myself for recommendations just because of that.
These platforms / products should be just services. Give the user enough information to make the decision themselves, and help them make the best decision with the most accurate and pertinent information. I hate that these products shove content into your face.
Anyone else feel like the golden age of internet services is behind us, and this shitty version is the only path ahead of us?
Where are the messenger platforms ideas?? The next mails are missing :(