Everyone complains that facebooks product sucks, they're a terrible company, and Zuckerborg is a first-rate asshat. How do they still exist?
How has, in all this time, no one else put together a decent social media platform that people actually like? Or an auction site? I'd have thought after the first 6 months the great "competitive ideas marketplace of the innernet" would have laid waste to Facebook and Ebay both. Neither company should have gotten this far.
Yet they continue, with their billions. Crazy.
Personally I don't think there is a need for a one stop social media site. That is what the totality of the Internet is. The ability for thousands and millions of disparate sites and apps to connect people.
Facebook had/has its place essentially as a friend finder. After that though we are looking a a re-AOLization of the online world. There are plenty of other ways to accomplish all of the other things Facebook does and as users we benefit if they are not all under one roof or sphere of control.
Whatsapp comes into existence as part of that bigger Internet which is the Ultimate social media. We don't need a social media site. We need all the sites with their own value that allow us to connect and interact in unique ways and for unique purposes. In fact the whole idea of a "social media site" is antithesis to what has made the Internet so overwhelmingly succesful.
Consider every website as an interchangeable block where we can each construct our social media reality. The great part about it is we as individuals can easy add on new sites that offer new benefits and technologies. At the same time we can remove sites that have become old, tired and less useful. If people continue to think as one site, like Facebook, is social media, then they are beholden to what they decide is important, what they decide needs to be updated, and what they decide is no longer useful.
However if we all discard this notion of a centralized social media site and instead utilize the while of the Internet to construct our own unique social experience, everyone is better off.
If things had advanced differently and Facebook messenger was the defacto world wide message service then whatsapp might no longer exist. This is not good for anyone. I think narrowly focused sites and apps tag focus on doing one or only a few things extremely well is the better route. We as users can then pick or choose what is best for us. The more all the tools get centralized under one banner the more limited our future experiences will be.
Facebook has acquired two companies who do exactly what I am talking about in Instagram and whatsapp. For the time being they will remain relatively autonomous. However this is an impossible long term reality for a publically traded company. For the good of the Internet and all its users there is no doubt in my mind we all would have been better off if Instagram and whatsapp remained independent. Not just independent from Facebook but from any company trying lasso the entire social experience.
Google does some things amazingly well and thus provides multiple quality pieces to the Internet as building blocks. However I believe it is a very good thing that google has struggled with google+. I don't want all the building blocks coming out of one factory.
So for me it is great that Facebook is an amazing tool for finding old friends or keeping tabs on new ones. However I wish them failure on pretty much everything else they try to do. It is one reason why I am a fan of twitter. They have been one thing from inception and become an invaluable building block for most people constructing their own social media reality.
The crazy thing is that both Instagram and whatsapp started off as iOS apps. Something that was not even intended to exist in the original iOS/iPhone plans.
Do people who regularly use whatsapp really want to have to run the Facebook app some day to send whatsapp messages? Some day that will happen. It may not be for a long while but it is coming. Mobile device apps perfectly illustrate what I think social media building should be. I don't want to load a single does-it-all app. I want to use twenty different apps that all do their part the best.
The Facebook acquisition actually opens a huge door for potential competitors who up until now have failed to understand why whatsapp succeeded. I think it is possible for someone to take the same basic blueprint but move it to the next level. While we have seen several people saying they are going to stop using whatsapp due to the purchase it is hard to tell if that will have any significant impact. Long term, though, Facebook's ownership will show, both good and bad. Whatsapp business model was never one that was going to make a great deal of money but it did/does have a relatively low amount of overhead per user. So its real endgame was always going to be with a bigger company footing the bill. Perhaps it is all just part of Zuckerberg wanting to nobly bring the Internet to the whole world. That is besides the point. I root for failure here simply because an independent replacement serves the Internet and the world better in the long run. We don't need and should not want Facebook for games or doing SMS type messaging or any number of other things. We should want Facebook to excel at being what Facebook was originally designed to do.
If that allows them to spend 19 billion dollars to try and bring text messaging to the world fine. However that is like $3 for every person on earth. The upside is that this gives them fewer resources to try and expand "social media" under the Facebook umbrella. There is zero chance Facebook will ever financially break even on this investment let alone profit off it. So in the end it benefits us all. Whatsapp just supports the idea that the independent building blocks are what make the Internet itself social media. Now it is time for them to step aside for the next wave.
