Facebook News Update 2014: Facebook Inc. has been engaged in acquiring WhatsApp Inc. for $19 billion lately, cracking the e-money industry and affecting the future of its business for its growing audience, Biz Journal reported.
Farhad Manjoo, New York Times technology writer, in recent times met with CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook headquarters to converse about the future and innovation level of the social network touching on its fresh WhatsApp purchase, getting familiar with a businesses' audience and other topics.
According to New York Times, Mr. Zuckerberg has been working on revamping the way the Facebook creates and distributes new services. The effort, which he began, discussing this year, is called Creative Labs, and can be summarized in a single word: apps.
"What we're doing with Creative Labs is basically unbundling the big blue app," Zuckerberg said.
During the interview, FB CEO said, Facebook was one big thing, a website or mobile app that let you indulge all of your online social needs. Now, on mobile phones especially, Facebook will begin to fragment into many smaller, more narrowly focused services, some of which won't even carry Facebook's branding, and may not require a Facebook account to use.
When asked about Facebook's home-grown Messenger product and mobile messaging app WhatsApp, Zuckerberg said it would be a mistake to compare them since they have different uses, as stated in Biz Journal.
New York Times reported that last week, Facebook began notifying users that it would soon require installation of the stand-alone Messenger app to send Facebook messages.
Mr. Zuckerberg said the multi-app approach is intended to adapt Facebook to the way people use mobile phones, which now account for the bulk of Facebook's visits and advertising revenue.
"In mobile, there's a big premium on creating single-purpose, first-class experiences," he said.
The multi-app strategy lets Facebook take creative risks. "You'll see us exploring new areas that we felt we didn't have the room to do before," Mr. Zuckerberg added.
Ted Zoller, the director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, argues that such a system's success is far from guaranteed because of the lure of start-up money.
"If you're a talented engineer and have a good idea at Facebook, why would you create it while you're at Facebook and make Mark Zuckerberg richer?" he asked.
Mr. Zuckerberg said he wasn't concerned about the ailing, and was prepared to wait for Paper, an iPhone app that lets users navigate Facebook's News Feed through a system of touch gestures, and other Creative Labs projects to slowly gain an audience.
According to Andrew Razeghi founder of the consulting group, StrategyLab,
there's logic to this view. "You often see that isolating innovative teams from some of the commercial demands of a company - giving them a quarantined, protected status - is one of the better ways to promote innovation."
Facebook found they were being used by different people for different purposes. "I think we basically saw that the messaging space is bigger than we'd initially realized," Mr. Zuckerberg said.
According to Manjoo, this idea explains Facebook's growing appetite for acquisitions. On a huge mobile web, services like WhatsApp and Instagram can benefit from Facebook's resources while maintaining their own communities and, crucially, not cannibalizing Facebook's own user base.
It also explains Facebook's willingness to be looser with its own branding. "We went out of our way to just call it Paper, not Facebook Paper," Mr. Zuckerberg said of the new app. "One of the things that we're trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren't all tied to Facebook identity."
