In the history of human communication, the Facebook post is a highly unnatural way to interact with friends and acquaintances. It’s akin to standing before a room filled with every single person you know and delivering a presentation about your personal life. You really don’t want all of those people listening, since a lot of them won’t care and a few of them you’d rather not tell. Sure, Facebook’s privacy controls let you target posts in principle, but in practice it’s a lot of work, especially when you’re trying to share something quickly.
This overly public nature is a big reason why Facebook, long stereotyped as a teenage obsession, today has a self-admitted problem with young people. Namely: They are leaving. By one estimate, some 11 million fewer high school and college kids in the US use Facebook today than did three years ago. Increasingly, kids don’t want to be on a network where their parents can so easily monitor their communications. The generation that has grown up with social media is also wary of its permanence—that picture you post today may come back to haunt you when you’re ready to find a job. Even the site’s central design, a timeline that literally begins with your birth, emphasizes the notion that Facebook is forever.
This approach, as popular and powerful as it turned out to be, has created an opportunity for the mobile-messaging apps. They all foster a more natural feeling of conversation taking place between ad hoc groups of friends. Even better, to participate you don’t have to set up yet another social network. Instead, you just capitalize on the one that’s already in your pocket: your phone’s address book. With all of them, you download the app and, based on matches in your phone book, get automatically connected with any of your contacts who are also on the new service. After that, it’s astonishingly fast and easy to send texts, photos, and more, just as you would with SMS. (...)
But with 450 million people, WhatsApp’s plate is already looking pretty full. Yet Livingston is probably correct in his belief that Facebook can’t win the messaging wars, even with the infusion of WhatsApp’s user base. That’s because the messaging wars might never be won by anyone.
Why? For the same reasons that companies like WhatsApp and Kik have been able to grow so fast in the first place. Mobile apps are easy to download and launch with a single finger tap; the phone’s contact list is always available to get you up and running with at least a few good friends. On mobile devices, the self-reinforcing network effect might not be as important as it has been on the web. A recent study of 15- to 25-year-olds in the UK showed that 25 percent of them were using multiple messaging apps.
“The winner-take-all dynamic is obliterated on mobile,” argues Benedict Evans, an analyst and investor with Andreessen Horowitz. It’s not just that these apps can access our address books, reducing the frictional barriers to joining. The mobile experience makes it trivial to pick different apps for different uses with the mere tap of a thumb. And this shift, in turn, accelerates the process of building companies around such apps. “You don’t have to raise $50 million,” Evans says. “You don’t have to have 500 employees. You can have 20 to 40 guys who have never raised any money from venture capitalists reach 500 million users.”
This overly public nature is a big reason why Facebook, long stereotyped as a teenage obsession, today has a self-admitted problem with young people. Namely: They are leaving. By one estimate, some 11 million fewer high school and college kids in the US use Facebook today than did three years ago. Increasingly, kids don’t want to be on a network where their parents can so easily monitor their communications. The generation that has grown up with social media is also wary of its permanence—that picture you post today may come back to haunt you when you’re ready to find a job. Even the site’s central design, a timeline that literally begins with your birth, emphasizes the notion that Facebook is forever.This approach, as popular and powerful as it turned out to be, has created an opportunity for the mobile-messaging apps. They all foster a more natural feeling of conversation taking place between ad hoc groups of friends. Even better, to participate you don’t have to set up yet another social network. Instead, you just capitalize on the one that’s already in your pocket: your phone’s address book. With all of them, you download the app and, based on matches in your phone book, get automatically connected with any of your contacts who are also on the new service. After that, it’s astonishingly fast and easy to send texts, photos, and more, just as you would with SMS. (...)
But with 450 million people, WhatsApp’s plate is already looking pretty full. Yet Livingston is probably correct in his belief that Facebook can’t win the messaging wars, even with the infusion of WhatsApp’s user base. That’s because the messaging wars might never be won by anyone.
Why? For the same reasons that companies like WhatsApp and Kik have been able to grow so fast in the first place. Mobile apps are easy to download and launch with a single finger tap; the phone’s contact list is always available to get you up and running with at least a few good friends. On mobile devices, the self-reinforcing network effect might not be as important as it has been on the web. A recent study of 15- to 25-year-olds in the UK showed that 25 percent of them were using multiple messaging apps.
“The winner-take-all dynamic is obliterated on mobile,” argues Benedict Evans, an analyst and investor with Andreessen Horowitz. It’s not just that these apps can access our address books, reducing the frictional barriers to joining. The mobile experience makes it trivial to pick different apps for different uses with the mere tap of a thumb. And this shift, in turn, accelerates the process of building companies around such apps. “You don’t have to raise $50 million,” Evans says. “You don’t have to have 500 employees. You can have 20 to 40 guys who have never raised any money from venture capitalists reach 500 million users.”
by Mat Honan, Wired | Read more:
Image: Ben Wiseman
