> 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.
It was a smart acquisition for sure, but "ruthless business genius" is a bit of hyperbole imho. FB's market cap was in excess of 200B at the time and they were growing like crazy. 16B on buying what they had failed to build internally and needed as a moat around their core business seems pretty straightforward.
Mere mortals like us just get caught up on all the extra zeroes these guys are playing around with.
In addition to the agreed price of $16B, Facebook added $3.6B to retain employees. WhatsApp had 55 employees at the time [0]. Near the end of the referenced article is an interesting comparison of different prices/employee for other acquisitions.
> I think 99% of executives on earth wouldn't have made that decision.
We conclude, 99% of executives are geniuses. I just feel like the term 'genius' gets thrown around inflationary. Being successful != being a genius. There is more to it (it actually isn't even a requirement) . At least I want to believe that.
> 16 billion dollars for a 24(?) person company with no revenue.
You are minimizing the impact of WA….. by a lot. At that time, almost all the smartphone users in India were using WA. The transaction gave FB all of those ~half billion users in just one shot.
It’s notable here that none of the founders of IG and WA are with Meta today - due to ethical differences.
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.
Back in the early days that was the only way these services operates: AOL IM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, IRC, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, Skype, MySpaceIM etc.
Even now you have Discord, Slack, Steam Chat… and that’s before you start taking federated services like (Matrix and XMPP) or other social networks (like Twitter, Reddit, etc) into account.
This shift to using mobile numbers is a recent change. And not one I’m particularly fond of either.
When your phone number changes, WhatsApp asks if you want to change your number. You don't have to accept this, it will work fine on your old number. It is risky if you lose the SIM card but it works, I continued using an old number for three or four years after changing numbers and I was never forced to prove that I still was the owner of the old number.
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).
WhatsApp doesn’t provide anything messenger doesn’t. As far as I can tell, WhatsApp as a product reached its ‘market fit’ years and years ago, in that they stopped bothering trying to add anything to it. Real pity in some ways its not even slightly extensible
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.
I went to college in the USA, and none of my classmates had any idea what WhatsApp is.
Funnily enough, my US university's "international office" (the department that deals with international students including facilitating visas, travel signatures, SEVIS, resolving other confusions of international students etc) setup a WhatsApp group to communicate with all international students because that's the one app all of us had in common.
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.
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.
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.
Bummer for the users who chose WhatsApp over Messenger. Many didn't want a company, like Facebook, to have PII on them, yet FB just bought it all up pretty much screwing these people.
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:
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.
A lot of that data probably is for sale, but think how much more powerful the VPN is when the metadata is more valuable than the probably-encrypted-anyway raw traffic:
- you can directly correlate an Onavo user's traffic to their Facebook profile for demographic and interest data which telecoms won't even know.
- if two Onavo users are both Facebook users, you can identify up-and-coming apps which pose a threat to Facebook's most valuable asset: the social network itself (the links between people, not any FB software). That includes both explicit links ("Friend" requests) as well as implicit links like mutual group memberships, mutual participation in comment threads, mutual "private" sharing of the same content, etc.
- you get a more complete picture of a person's phone habits across the entire day, not just when the Facebook app is front and center. Remember that this happened immediately after the failure of the "Facebook Home" product which provided application usage tracking by acting as an Android "Launcher" replacement.
- you get a more complete picture of up-and-coming apps' "stickiness", i.e. if a person opens the competitor app immediately when a notification comes in versus if they leave it for a while and get back to it later.
- you get a more complete picture in markets where dual-SIM phones are popular (e.g. when people might have voice/SMS service on one and pre-paid data on the other).
- you get a more complete picture in markets where people seek out Wi-Fi for high-bandwidth activities due to the expense or unavailability of unlimited mobile data.
- you can use Facebook's ad targeting system to directly push Onavo on people in markets you want to enter and dominate.
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..
> WhatsApp could've expanded out into a full social network the same way LINE and WeChat did in Asia
That was never going to happen. If you listen to the interviews from Brian Action, he wanted WhatsApp to stay minimal. He didn't like those other apps that had tons of features/ bloat.
> 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.
It's current enterprise value is only part of the story - and as we all know a valuable company today can entirely disappear in the future if it is sufficiently mismanaged. Vendor lock in was the favorite tool of IBM and Oracle. Things certainly change no matter how dominant a company can appear at a moment in time. Doubly so with social media with fickle users and generational opportunities with younger cohorts replacing and redefining usage patterns.
Yes, Facebook has by all accounts a commanding position, except competitors are demolishing it with younger demographics in key bellwether regions, and there are many concerning aspects about it's recent growth prospects. Facebook holds the record for the biggest single day market cap evaporation in stock market history (and also the record for second biggest). They are closer to their pre-WhatsApp market cap today then they are to their previous peak.
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.
It's almost like he isn't a good businessman and was just at the right place at the right time.
I worry that the majority of billionaires were just lucky and confused that for skill. Then we give them disproportionate influence over society. Basically letting the pigeons drive the bus.
The most important men in town would come to fawn on me!
They would ask me to advise them,
Like a Solomon the Wise.
"If you please, Reb Tevye..."
"Pardon me, Reb Tevye..."
Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes!
And it won't make one bit of difference if i answer right or wrong.
When you're rich, they think you really know!
>It's almost like he isn't a good businessman and was just at the right place at the right time.
What's this claim based off of? Is there anything concrete you can point to in the earnings reports, whether recent or any of them over the last decade, to justify this statement?
Back then, everyone was thinking about how to make a super app like WeChat. The thinking was that if you hooked everyone on some practical application, like chat, you could add in banking, lending, games, news, etc. FB sorta did this with FB itself to some extent but never completely achieved that super app status. Messenger obviously did not, and neither did WhatsApp. If someone did do this, they would have achieved complete dominance.
It's interesting how detailed and thorough his thinking is and at the same time all his strategic direction seems to be 100% personal intuition. FB must have an army of researchers who could tell him what users actual want and he doesn't even think of that.
Many of the ideas he expressed (in terms of interacting with businesses) seem to be how WeChat runs, very successfully (never used it myself, just based on what I've heard).
Booking a restaurant is generally ok by phone but if you try to do it online you often get some crappy random website that’s different every time. I can imagine a world where you do it by some messenger interface which somehow Facebook make hard to fuck up for the business. I can imagine that being good, half good (I think there are roughly two kinds of booking. One starts with criteria about date/time/occasion/party/budget/location/cuisine and looks for available places and the other starts with a specific restaurant with other particulars relatively free. An experience might only work well for one), or bad. But it isn’t obviously bad.
Much as a decentralised Internet has good properties, having every small business outsource a nontrivial online presence to a bunch of crappy other companies that lack the scale or incentives to do well is not one of them.
The problem is it's never been his Kool Aid. He stole the Kool Aid from multiple other people and is pretending like he invented the concept (yes people will now argue you can't steal the 'concept' of Kool Aid, and it's about execution; but my point stands, other people can't borrow the concept if one person pulls the rug out from everyone else) of Kool Aid
>"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.
NLP not being nearly ready. Some of the requests were powered by people on the backend and we hoped to use that as a training set. We could, but we only were able to automate the most basic things like reminders, weather, todo lists, daily transit, etc
Readit News
> 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.
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.
32 of the employees were engineers [1].
[0] https://theconversation.com/whatsapp-bought-for-19-billion-w...
[1] https://india.sequoiacap.com/article/four-numbers-that-expla...
That is giving too much credit to 1% of executives, I am willing to bet 99.999% wouldn't have made that decision.
Although arguably speaking, executives are managerial mindset. Which is very different to entrepreneur.
> I think 99% of executives on earth wouldn't have made that decision.
We conclude, 99% of executives are geniuses. I just feel like the term 'genius' gets thrown around inflationary. Being successful != being a genius. There is more to it (it actually isn't even a requirement) . At least I want to believe that.
You are minimizing the impact of WA….. by a lot. At that time, almost all the smartphone users in India were using WA. The transaction gave FB all of those ~half billion users in just one shot.
It’s notable here that none of the founders of IG and WA are with Meta today - due to ethical differences.
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.
Back in the early days that was the only way these services operates: AOL IM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, IRC, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, Skype, MySpaceIM etc.
Even now you have Discord, Slack, Steam Chat… and that’s before you start taking federated services like (Matrix and XMPP) or other social networks (like Twitter, Reddit, etc) into account.
This shift to using mobile numbers is a recent change. And not one I’m particularly fond of either.
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.
Facebook can and do read your messages at will.
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.
Funnily enough, my US university's "international office" (the department that deals with international students including facilitating visas, travel signatures, SEVIS, resolving other confusions of international students etc) setup a WhatsApp group to communicate with all international students because that's the one app all of us had in common.
I would not be surprised if we see more consolidation in the sector.
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.
Is it because the whatsapp dudes used Erlang?
import fbcorelibs;
Creates a 250+mb ios/Android binary that bump against app store limits
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The game's not over yet. Maybe Meta sells, or is forced sell, WhatsApp. Or maybe people move on to the new thing.
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.
Is this actually happening or just wishful thinking
Dead Comment
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.
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-...
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/21/facebook-removes-onavo/
Sure, you may not get the raw traffic but that seems not very useful for FB.
- you can directly correlate an Onavo user's traffic to their Facebook profile for demographic and interest data which telecoms won't even know.
- if two Onavo users are both Facebook users, you can identify up-and-coming apps which pose a threat to Facebook's most valuable asset: the social network itself (the links between people, not any FB software). That includes both explicit links ("Friend" requests) as well as implicit links like mutual group memberships, mutual participation in comment threads, mutual "private" sharing of the same content, etc.
- you get a more complete picture of a person's phone habits across the entire day, not just when the Facebook app is front and center. Remember that this happened immediately after the failure of the "Facebook Home" product which provided application usage tracking by acting as an Android "Launcher" replacement.
- you get a more complete picture of up-and-coming apps' "stickiness", i.e. if a person opens the competitor app immediately when a notification comes in versus if they leave it for a while and get back to it later.
- you get a more complete picture in markets where dual-SIM phones are popular (e.g. when people might have voice/SMS service on one and pre-paid data on the other).
- you get a more complete picture in markets where people seek out Wi-Fi for high-bandwidth activities due to the expense or unavailability of unlimited mobile data.
- you can use Facebook's ad targeting system to directly push Onavo on people in markets you want to enter and dominate.
Dead Comment
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: 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..
That was never going to happen. If you listen to the interviews from Brian Action, he wanted WhatsApp to stay minimal. He didn't like those other apps that had tons of features/ bloat.
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.
Yes, Facebook has by all accounts a commanding position, except competitors are demolishing it with younger demographics in key bellwether regions, and there are many concerning aspects about it's recent growth prospects. Facebook holds the record for the biggest single day market cap evaporation in stock market history (and also the record for second biggest). They are closer to their pre-WhatsApp market cap today then they are to their previous peak.
We'll see.
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.
Didnt Google+ had something similar called circles, you could share different things with different people based on which circle they were in.
I worry that the majority of billionaires were just lucky and confused that for skill. Then we give them disproportionate influence over society. Basically letting the pigeons drive the bus.
The most important men in town would come to fawn on me! They would ask me to advise them, Like a Solomon the Wise. "If you please, Reb Tevye..." "Pardon me, Reb Tevye..." Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes! And it won't make one bit of difference if i answer right or wrong. When you're rich, they think you really know!
What's this claim based off of? Is there anything concrete you can point to in the earnings reports, whether recent or any of them over the last decade, to justify this statement?
In many many countries you can't live without WhatsApp. That can't be said about the rest of their apps.
That's why it was worth 20B.
https://pastebin.com/e6af5MRv
Pasting a long document as multiple images via a Twitter thread needs to be some sort of punishable crime.
https://pastebin.com/raw/TJypYNGQ
Mark getting excited about using a message to book a restaurant seems like a prime example of this.
Much as a decentralised Internet has good properties, having every small business outsource a nontrivial online presence to a bunch of crappy other companies that lack the scale or incentives to do well is not one of them.
He was basically explaining chat bot/s without knowing it.
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.
Eleven months later, FB bought a little startup I was part of to try to build exact this. (Spolier: it flopped)