I think Facebook (meta)‘s key asset is now WhatsApp.
Facebook is practically dead. It’s just a stream of awful content that isn’t from your friends. It’s hyper advertising and desperate attempts to clone other platforms as it slowly dies. It’ll continue for a long time, eventually becoming yahoo like, but young people do not care about it at all.
Instagram has similarly been over monetised but in an earlier stage. It has been roundly defeated by TikTok, utterly destroyed by TikTok, in the battle for teens’ attention.
Oculus was a great buy but the gap (in terms of years) between instagram’s peak and oculus really coming online is just too wide to “save” the company.
In contrast, WhatsApp is still used across the generations. It’s the one platform where grandparents and grandkids are both active users.
If I were Zuck then I’d focus on turning WhatsApp into an Asian-style chat platform with integrated services. That I can’t wire money on WhatsApp in the U.K. is I think a very very big strategic error on his part.
It seems clear Facebook (meta) can’t build anything truly new, but they can certainly extend platforms - they should focus on WhatsApp. It has longevity, strong network effects, and huge potential. Just don’t use ads and destroy it.
Otoh Facebook deserves to die so I hope he continues to think oculus will save them.
Ukraine is of course no major market for Facebook, but it's a good example that doesn't match what you describe at all. In Ukraine, Facebook is the place where you follow top journalists, anti-corruption people, activists, and other public figures. It's basically an extremely valuable addition to the media, where anyone can be lifted in popularity in a matter of hours if their content is truly important. Facebook has been an invaluable tool during the Maidan revolution in 2014 combining its social and video-streaming capabilities. It works in times where media is breaking down, being bought by oligarchs, and isn't to be relied upon.
I don't see any alternative that would replace it, in terms of being social, everyone being present on it, and allowing long text+image+video content to be posted and spread easily.
Facebook has only become as popular in Ukraine as it is to fill the void created by the government blocking VKontakte. And some Ukrainians I know do still use VKontakte despite that.
Yeah, a wise decision by our government indeed. However, one of the major reasons Vkontakte is popular is due to it being filled with illegal music and video content without bothering to remove it, at least most people I know amongst its still-users keep using it exactly for that.
Oh, no, it's now kinda useless for that too unless you somewhat go out of your way. They've signed contracts with recording companies and "legalized" most of the music several years ago, killing off the public API (audio.* methods), adding ads (which I've never heard thanks to my ad blocker, but still) and imposing ever more nonsensical client-side restrictions in mobile apps (which I use an old version of) that are removed by buying a subscription.
But — despite Mail.Ru Group doing its best to ruin it, it's still way better than Facebook. There's a chronological feed even! And they aren't brave enough to ruin that.
Full disclosure: I worked at VK on the official Android app for 5 years, most of that as the only Android developer in the entire company. I quit in 2016 because of growing disagreement with the management about our goals. VK still has a lot of sentimental value for me because it literally changed my life, multiple times over.
Anyway, if you do want the experience of the OG VK but without FSB and all the other perils that come with centralization, you can follow the development of my ActivityPub project: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen
Twitter literally limits the length of your tweets. What can you say in a couple of phrases in the context of activism and politics? Just link another platform? Don't get me started on twitter threads, this is abomination. My patience usually runs out after the third tweet in a thread.
Another day Twitter CEO resigned and he posted a screenshot of his mail. Why couldn't he post it in a proper text format so people can reflow text and read it on different screens? Because Twitter sucks.
I despise each and every "@threadreaderapp unroll" tweet. People want to use Twitter as a blogging platform and Twitter itself doesn't want to be a blogging platform.
I truly don’t think so. The vast majority of people I know in Europe and Asia use Facebook, not Twitter. Only my USA acquaintances use Twitter all the time.
The problem is that Whatsapp is a very non-US-oriented app - its is very popular in EU and Asia/Africa/Latin America, but none of my US friends use it other than to reach us outside of the US.
Since it's not US-focused, the US execs (and boards, investors) tend to dismiss it. This explains why Whatsapp was left, relatively, untouched by FB in terms of user experience, after the acquisition - it's not shiny by any means for somebody in the valley, so no exec wants to hang that in their portofolio
Which countries in Asia still count it as the most popular messaging app? China is on WeeChat, Korea has KakaoTalk and LINE is everywhere else. It is pretty amazing that Meta had three messaging apps and none of them are close to something like LINE in terms of ubiquity or utility.
My understanding is that WhatsApp is pretty big in India and my experience is that WeChat is pretty ubiquitous within SE Asia. The Singapore govt uses WhatsApp now for much of its govt comms and a lot of small business uses WhatsApp. Also recently in the news, you can book an Uber via WhatsApp . I'd be curious how WhatsApp does in Japan and South Korea.
Also my hunch is that Aus and NZ use WhatsApp heavily too
Literally all of India uses WhatsApp. Non-WhatsApp users (exclusively Signal/Telegram/Mitron or whatever homegrown flavour of the day) are a rounding error.
The recent privacy notice from WhatsApp gave some boost to signal and telegram, but it got nowhere. WhatsApp has become an integral part of Indian's life, it would be hard to break up that relationship.
Not Asia, but SMS is dead pretty much in Haiti, and everyone uses WhatsApp. Internet usage is low enough to even be an alternative to phone calls in most cases (especially for the young adults category).
Asian messenger apps like LINE are really more of an “everything app.” I use LINE to chat with everyone. In Taiwan it’s a given that that anyone you meet will have LINE. Businesses have a special business line account that staff can use. You can book your hotel, vet apt, reserve a table, etc because every business has LINE. You can pay for things with it by letting someone scan your code or or pay for things online by clicking a link that opens line so you can authorize the payment.
As far as the messenger goes, it works really well. They’ve done the best job I’ve seen at making chat history searchable or let you jump to a date instead of scrolling backwards for an hour. They also allow you to send cute stickers, and they are used constantly.
The amount of personal data left in chats would be worrying for sure. Not to mention security culture is not really tight here. I’ve had hotels ask me to send a picture of my credit card for payment a few times.
As far as other things being compromised, I’d just deauth line from my bank account.
That's not the point. Execs don't dismiss WhatsApp because it's not US-oriented enough and therefore not shiny. Large multinational companies don't have that strong of bias towards any market or they wouldn't be successful multinational in the first place. Also, who in their right mind would want to be in charge of a market leader with 2 billions users? WhatsApp is so unshiny that Will Cathcart was in Fortune 40 under 40 last year...
WhatsApp was not left untouched by the way. If you are not targeting entreprise customers, what really makes money in the messaging world is payments and WhatsApp is moving hard into this market. It's just doing so in India.
2 billion of low-value users; FB users are accounted at $150 a head; out of 2 billion users it's account for, only ~100 million would part with a $1 / month to use the application - less that $12 a year per paying user. WhatsApp doesn't have any other monetisation strategy, there are no ads, and the markets they are in are extremely sensitive to fees for payments, for example.
> It's just doing so in India.
Everybody is doing so in India thanks to UPI. Google Pay, virtually unseen outside Tap and Pay in other markets, has 35% percent of the market in India - Whatsapp has a high 0.27% percent of the market in Sept 2021, up from 0.01% previously. https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/upi-top-3-retain-...
India payments competition is ruthless thanks to low barriers of entry.
You're right that WhatsApp really took their sweet time to copy WeChat. I wonder though whether there were mitigating factors. I know bringing WA onto the FB infra was a big job. Also had a friend that worked at WA and he was talking about India Payments over two years ago
While many are still using WhatsApp, it has taken significant reputation impact and users are dropping. Potential is only for the limited user group. It can be only changed by changing owner in general.
From my experience (Europe), not that many users actually left it. Sure, many people constantly complain about privacy issues but only a few very tech-savy left for Signal. And even they cannot leave Whatsapp as it's the de-facto standard. I don't know a single person who has a mobile phone and isn't on Whatsapp at least once a month.
Same. I prefer Telegram, and a few of my closest friends also use it, so I use it the most, but even my contact list on WhatsApp is at least 5x longer.
I doubt teenager me would not have been happy to share a social media presence with my parents aside for superficial content. So every few generations we might gain another platform regardless of its quality. I assume that Tiktok will fall as well, I hear the first people calling it boring.
I would agree that Facebook is practically dead but Instagram defeated by TikTok? In very young teens' maybe, that is not really my social bubble but Instagram is far more prevalent everywhere else. Speaking as a someone from Central Europe.
Facebook is practically dead. It’s just a stream of awful content that isn’t from your friends. It’s hyper advertising and desperate attempts to clone other platforms as it slowly dies. It’ll continue for a long time, eventually becoming yahoo like, but young people do not care about it at all.
Instagram has similarly been over monetised but in an earlier stage. It has been roundly defeated by TikTok, utterly destroyed by TikTok, in the battle for teens’ attention.
Oculus was a great buy but the gap (in terms of years) between instagram’s peak and oculus really coming online is just too wide to “save” the company.
In contrast, WhatsApp is still used across the generations. It’s the one platform where grandparents and grandkids are both active users.
If I were Zuck then I’d focus on turning WhatsApp into an Asian-style chat platform with integrated services. That I can’t wire money on WhatsApp in the U.K. is I think a very very big strategic error on his part.
It seems clear Facebook (meta) can’t build anything truly new, but they can certainly extend platforms - they should focus on WhatsApp. It has longevity, strong network effects, and huge potential. Just don’t use ads and destroy it.
Otoh Facebook deserves to die so I hope he continues to think oculus will save them.