To promote transparency within the company, chief executive and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg participated in Facebook's first ever town hall question-and-answer session recently. There were questions about Facebook Messenger, 'The Social Network' movie and Mark Zuckerberg's fashion choices. However, the most popular question was about the Facebook Messenger app.
Earlier this year, Facebook decided to turn off the messaging feature in its main mobile app and redirect users to a separate app called Messenger. Many users were outraged because they did not want to have to use a separate app for messaging. Despite the protest against the separate app, Facebook Messenger hit 500 million monthly active users as of yesterday.
Why did Facebook force users to download a separate Messenger app? The short answer is that ten billion messages are sent through Facebook per day and users had to open a separate tab within the main Facebook app to see them if they were away from their desktops. Facebook simply wanted to simplify the process for Messenger users. Here is what Zuckerberg said in the Q&A:
You know the first thing I want to do is just acknowledge that - you know - asking everyone in our community to install another app - Messenger - is a big ask. So I appreciate that. That required work and was a bunch of friction and I just want to acknowledge that up front.
The reason why we wanted to do this is because we really believe that this is a better experience and we think that messaging is becoming increasingly important. So, on mobile, each app really can focus on doing one thing well, we think. And the primary purpose of the Facebook app today is News Feed. Right? You open it and you can look at content that your friends are sharing or public figures, and you can share things. And messaging was this behavior that people were doing more and more.
There are more than 10 billion messages sent every day on Facebook. But in order to get to your messages, you had to open up the app - which could take a few seconds - and then go to a separate tab. And what we saw was that all of the messaging apps that people were using and they relied on the most were - kind of - these dedicated, focused experiences. So whether it's the SMS app, or iMessage on your phone or something like WhatsApp - which has grown a lot in a lot of countries. They are these apps that are fast and they are just focused on messaging because you are probably messaging 15 to 20 times a day and having to go into an app, and wait for it to load, and then go through a bunch of steps to get to your messages or to send a message is a lot of friction. And we felt like we couldn't deliver the best experience in doing that.
So we believe that messaging is one of the few things that people actually do more than social networking. Right? I mean, in a lot of countries, we'll see that maybe 85% of the people who are online will use Facebook, but maybe 95% of people - or in some places 99% of people - will use SMS or send text messages, which probably fits with your own use of these products.
Even though it was a short term, painful thing - to ask folks to install a separate messaging app - we knew we could never deliver the quality of experience inside as just a tab in the main Facebook app. And that we needed to - if we wanted to focus on really serving this well - we needed to build a dedicated and focused experience.'
Question About Fan Page Reach
There was also a question about the decrease in reach for Facebook fan pages. Zuckerberg said 'as time goes on, people are just sharing more things on Facebook. So each person whose consuming content in their News Feed - they might read 100 stories from their friends and Pages a day. And as their friends share more content and as they follow more Pages and as those Pages share more content, there's just more competition.' There are 1,500 stories that they could see on the News Feed per day and they only see 100. That means that less than 10% of what people are posting, the person will actually get to in their News Feed. Only the highest quality content with the highest engagement will make it to the top.
Question About 'The Social Network' Movie
An audience member that traveled from Provo, Utah to attend the Facebook Q&A town hall in California asked Mark Zuckerberg about the accuracy of 'The Social Network' movie. Mark Zuckerberg replied:
Wow. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about that movie in a while. Kind of blocked that one out! You know, it was a very interesting experience - to watch a movie that was supposedly about my life - yeah, supposedly. You know, I think that the reality is that writing code and building a product and then building a company actually is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about.
So you could imagine that a lot of the stuff they probably had to embellish and make up because if they were really making a movie, it would have been of me sitting at a computer coding for two hours straight, which probably would have just not been that good of a movie. And these guys want to win awards and sell tickets so that's kind of where they went with it. I actually - to this day - I haven't really met the writer or a lot of the folks that made the movie.
I met the guy who played me one time when I was on Saturday Night Live. I think he was a little afraid to meet me after his portrayal. But I tried to be nice. But it was interesting - I mean, they went out of their way in the movie to try to get some interesting details correct like the design of the office. But on the overarching plot, in terms of why we're building Facebook - to help connect the world or how we did it - they just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful. You know, I take our mission very seriously.
We're here, not primarily to just build a company, but to help connect the world. And help people stay connected to the people who they love and they care about and to help them get information about the world. And we take that very seriously.
So the thing that I found the most interesting about the movie was that they kind of made up this whole plotline about how I somehow decided to create Facebook to, I think, attract girls. And one important piece of context is the woman who I am married to, who I have been dating for more than ten years, I was actually dating her before I even started Facebook. So, you know, if somehow I was trying to create Facebook to find more women, that probably would not have gone over too well in my relationship. And I probably would not still be married to her today. So you know, there were pretty glaring things that were just made up about the movie that made it pretty hard for me to take seriously. But, you know, we had some fun with it. We knew that everyone who works at Facebook would want to go see it anyway. Right? Because how often does someone make a major movie about your company?
So we actually took the whole company to see it, I think the day it came out. And there's this joke going around - where I think there is this scene in the movie where like we are drinking appletinis - and no one had ever heard of appletinis before this movie - but like somehow they made up when they were writing this was that it was my favorite drink - was an appletini. So for a while, everyone around the office was drinking appletinis - kind of making fun of me in the movie. So you know, you gotta have fun and have a sense of humor about it, but I think the real story was just a lot of hard work. Right? It's a lot of people who are engineers who kind of sit around and code and we're here because we are trying to help people connect. We believe deeply in this mission and our community today has 1.35 billion people in it. And there are 7 billion people in the world and we want to connect all of them. And that's why we're here.'
Question About Facebook Losing Its Charm
Someone in the audience at the town hall event asked a question about whether Facebook was losing its charm because it seems to be primarily used simply as a photo and video sharing website nowadays. Zuckerberg said that he has been asked by multiple people if Facebook is 'getting less cool.' He said:
You know it is an interesting question to me because my goal was never really to make Facebook 'cool.' I am not a cool person. And I've never really tried to be cool. Our model for Facebook has never been to try to make it particularly exciting to use. We just want to make it useful. The services that we aspire to be like in the world are - kind of - these basic things that you can rely on and that are there and that you would probably be pretty upset if they went away, but you're not sitting around celebrating all day long. So you go home, you turn on the lights, you are probably not like 'yeah electricity! Yeah!' It just needs to work! And the same thing with water and a lot of things like that.
My goal is that the ability to communicate and connect with people should be that. It should be something that people can rely on and people have. And it does not always need to be in your face. It's not like 'we're here, we're electricity, we're the social network!' It should just work. It should be there. There are actually a lot of changes and things we're constantly working on. But we try to have them be natural. And what I think tends to happen more often than not is when we get it right, a lot of the time people don't notice. And when we get it wrong or we don't do as smooth of a job as we should, then people notice. So, for example, there's the first question about Messenger. And part of the reason why that - kind of - turned into this issue where a lot of folks were upset that we asked them to install a new app... maybe we didn't handle that as smoothly as we could have in terms of the transition. But there are a lot of transitions we make that actually are very smooth. So, for example, you were talking about how now most of Facebook is photos. That's true! Five years ago, most of Facebook was text. And if you fast forward five years, probably most of it is going to be video - just because it is getting easier to capture video of the moments of your lives and share it. And that is just more technological challenges for Jay [Parikh] and his team to handle in terms of streaming that well.
But we're going to do that. And that's our job - to make sure that works - and works seamlessly as the world trends towards sharing more static stuff like text into more richer forms of content like video. We just want to be there and make that work without you having to notice... Five years from now when you wake up, a lot of the content on Facebook is video. You're just - kind of like - 'this is boring.' It's like 'this is how it should be. Of course, it's video.'
Another example is mobile. A few years ago, probably most of you used Facebook primarily on computers and today you probably use primarily on phones. And a lot of what we had to do was get our mobile apps to be faster. And we're continuing to work on that. We're not 100% of where we want to be, but for those of you who have been using our mobile apps for a few years, you know that they are a lot faster now and a lot better than they were a few years ago because we have focused on that. Speed is something that you should just be able to rely on. And know is going to be there. And that shouldn't have to be just something you celebrate. It should just be something that is implied - that you use a service and it's going to be fast.'
Question About Zuckerberg Wearing The Same Gray T-Shirt All The Time
From the Q&A thread, a Facebook user in Italy asked why Mark Zuckerberg wears the same shirt every day. Zuckerberg said 'you will be happy to know that there are multiple of the same shirt. Zuckerberg said:
It's a very simple question, but it actually speaks to how we think about our duty to the community here. You know, I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community. And there's actually a bunch of psychology theories that even making small decisions around what you wear or what you eat for breakfast or things like that. They kind of make you tired and consume you energy.
My view is that I'm in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than a billion people. Right? And I feel like I'm not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life so that way I can dedicate all of my energy towards just building the best products and services and helping us reach our goal and achieve this mission of helping to connect everyone in the world and giving them the ability to stay connected with the people that they love and care about.
So that's what I care about. So even though it kind of sounds silly that this is my reason for wearing a grey t-shirt everyday, it also is true. And I think there are a number of people throughout history who have - kind of - had the same approach. I think Steve Jobs did. I don't think President Obama chooses what he wears every day - kind of - for the same psychological reason. But in our case, I really want to just make sure that all of energy can go towards serving this community.'
One Billion Messaging Users
Now that Facebook Messenger passed 500 million monthly active users and the Facebook-owned WhatsApp messaging app said that it hit 600 million active users as of August 2014, it means that Facebook's messaging apps have over 1 billion aggregate monthly users. The overlap in users between WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger is unknown because they are independent services. 'With Messenger, you can reach people instantly. It is just as fast as SMS but gives you the ability to express yourself in ways that SMS can't,' said Facebook in a blog post. 'You can send stickers or videos, take selfies, chat with groups and make free calls. We've also continued to improve speed and reliability. Updates to Messenger ship every two weeks so it continues to evolve and improve.'
Do you think that the reason for forcing users to switch to a separate Messenger app makes sense? Let us know in the comments below!
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