Author: Nicholas Thompson / Source: WIRED
On Wednesday afternoon, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, described a sweeping new vision for his platform. “The future of communication,” he wrote, “will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure.
” The post raised all kinds of questions about Facebook’s business model and strategies, as well as the trade-offs the company could face. And so after the post went live, Zuckerberg spoke with WIRED about his vision.Nicholas Thompson: Mark, thank you for letting me talk to you for a few minutes.
The 3,200-word memo you wrote almost sounds like a manifesto for a new social network. You say, “this privacy-focused platform will be built around several principles.” Is the idea that you will eventually launch a new platform that goes on top of what you have? Or is this just the new direction in which all your products will evolve?
Mark Zuckerberg: The thinking is that there needs to be two types of platforms in the world: one is a more public platform, like the digital equivalent of a town square where you interact with lots of people at once. That’s largely what Facebook and Instagram are. And the other platform is the private space, the digital equivalent to the living room. And the foundation that we have for WhatsApp and Messenger is going to be the starting point for developing those platforms.
But if you look at what we’ve done over the last 15 years, we’ve taken Facebook and then Instagram and really built out whole social platforms around them. So on Facebook, for example, you’re not just posting things at this point. You can join different communities, you can create a page for your small businesses, you can create fund-raisers, you can find people to date through the dating service. There are all these different kinds of utilities for basically all the different things that you would want to do with everyone you know. And we basically built this whole platform around the town square. And it’s really a concept of the whole platform around all the private and intimate interactions that you would want to have. I think that’s really the opportunity here, on top of WhatsApp and Messenger, and what I’m trying to lay out is a privacy-focused vision for this kind of platform that starts with messaging and making that as secure as possible with end-to-end encryption, and then building all of the other kinds of private and intimate ways that you would want to interact—from calling, to groups, to stories, to payments, to different forms of commerce, to sharing location, to eventually having a more open-ended system to plug in different kinds of tools for providing the interaction with people in all the ways that you would want. So that’s the basic vision for what we’re trying to do.
NT: Does News Feed still exist then, whenever this is fully built?
MZ: Yes, yes. I mean, Facebook and Instagram and the digital equivalent of the town square will always be important. I actually think that they will continue to grow in importance. At the same time though, the things that we see growing the fastest, in terms of what people want to do, are private messaging, stories that are ephemeral and don’t stick around, small groups …
So I think that this idea of the digital living room is under-built out today. Right now we have messaging apps where we can send messages, but there should be a whole, deep platform built around all the ways that people want to interact in these private and intimate ways, similar to what you have Facebook and Instagram today. So it’s not that Facebook and Instagram are going to be less important for what they’re doing, it’s just that people sometimes want to interact in a town square, and sometimes they want to interact in the living room, and I think that that’s the next big frontier.
NT: But will people walk from the town square, from Facebook, into the living room? Will this be part of the Blue App on my phone, part of the Instagram app on my phone, or will this be a new app?
MZ: Well, probably some of each. The foundation of this will be the messaging experience that we built with Messenger and that we’ve started building on top of WhatsApp as well. But this is partially what I was trying to explain in the note around interoperability, that there are these artificial walls today where if you want to message someone who you see on Facebook, you have to use Messenger. If you want to message someone on Instagram, you have to use Direct, if you want to message someone on WhatsApp you have to use WhatsApp. But I think people tend to have one of the messaging apps that they prefer the most. So giving people the choice to say, “Hey, I want to use WhatsApp because I prefer that as my service where I can not only message people on WhatsApp but I can message people on Facebook or Instagram as well and have those services connect …” I think that that will unlock a lot more convenient and seamless experiences. So connecting the services in that way I think will be valuable. But people have to choose to do that, it’s not going to be something that we can just do. And you’ll always have the option to keep the accounts separate if you want.
NT: Got it. And then how will the business model work with this new system? Because Facebook’s current business model is based upon collecting lots of data and then building targeted ad experiences. That would be much harder with disappearing data and end-to-end encryption.
MZ: So yes, parts of this will be harder. But the basic way that we’ve approached things is first to focus on building the consumer service that people really want. Then focus on making it so people can organically interact with businesses, and then focus on paid ways that businesses can grow and get more distribution. So we’re still in the phase on this private messaging platform, of phase one, where we’re really focused on nailing the consumer experience. You know, a lot of countries, we are the lead messaging app. But in a lot of important ones, especially really important for the business, like the US for example, we’re not yet the leading messaging app. So there’s still a huge amount of work just in building the consumer experience that people love, and that will be the foundation. If we do that well, the business will be fine. Well, you know, depending on how well we execute it, it could be better or…
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