I wonder. Am I being too old-fashioned?
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Facebook wants to be
involved with everything you do!
Thenextweb.com
3/26/2015 posted by Owen Williams
Facebook’s F8 conference today, it
unveiled a number of big new changes to its service that transforms Messenger
into a platform, expands
Facebook Video even further and offers deeper integrations than
ever for developers.
The changes are actually really cool and great news for
developers — Facebook is finally turning Messenger into the hub for
everything, like LINE and WeChat already did in Asia — but
they also signal something much larger.
Facebook is declaring that it effectively wants to
own every single thing you do on the internet.
Let’s quickly go through the things that Facebook is making
inroads into controlling:
·
Social networking
·
Messaging your friends (Messenger,
WhatsApp)
·
Messaging businesses (Messenger)
·
Advertising (Paid Ads, LiveRail,
Pages)
·
Paying your friends
·
Buying and selling things online
·
Virtual reality (Oculus)
·
Gaming
·
News
·
Video/TV (Facebook Video)
·
Development platform (Parse)
·
How you actually receive the
internet
·
Photos (Instagram)
Here’s the thing: with Facebook’s announcements today, it’s
suddenly significantly harder to avoid the service at all. If you didn’t have a
Facebook already, like 1 billion other people, you’re going to find it even
harder to avoid in the future with these changes. It’s now becoming the easiest
way to do anything on the internet.
For example: you might wonder like I did this morning,
why on earth you’d want to share your videos with Facebook over YouTube?
Think of it this way: with YouTube, you’re sharing
videos into a vacuum and hoping they get picked up or discovered. On Facebook,
you’re dropping them into the company’s entire friend graph immediately.
Your video shows up in News Feed for people
straight away, without them needing to go to another service, and can naturally
gain velocity from there as friends share, like or comment on it. YouTube
doesn’t have that friend graph so it could never pull that off; nobody other
than Facebook can deliver content so directly to relevant audiences. Right
now, Facebook prioritizes showing video uploaded to the service in your
News Feed, but for how long?
Facebook can deliver your content to more people than any
other service. It owns the eyeballs that everyone wants to reach and the News
Feed can deliver more engagement/views/clicks than any other service could
hope to. These are the same reasons that news organizations are seemingly
falling over themselves to publish their news directly to the
service.
The problem is that Facebook controls what you see and when.
If it becomes the primary way to consume news and watch videos, what
happens when a news story is controversial about the company itself? Or isn’t
within its content guidelines (like pornography)? You’ll be receiving a
filtered version of the internet that’s controlled by one company.
With Messenger now serving
as a platform, you’ll be able to do everything from ordering a cab
to creating stupid GIFs, without needing to leave the service. You
can message businesses directly to ask questions, reserve a table or
organize an event. This is all possible from the same app.
Now that you can pay friends directly in the Messenger app
too, there’s one less reason to leave. Every day that another integration is
built for Messenger, there’s another reason to stay on the service; Facebook
now owns your private conversations and your payments.
All of these things are awesome, because we live in a time
where it’s easier than ever to do everything you want to do, with no friction,
in a single place. Unfortunately, it also puts a lot of power in a single
place. Google should be scared; the reasons to use its service are quickly
decreasing as people stay inside Facebook’s walls longer.
For those in emerging countries, Facebook works with
Internet.org to provide free access to a bunch of services in education,
government and other areas. It also provides free access to Facebook.
Those who are connecting for the first time in these
countries often don’t
understand the difference between Facebook and “the internet.”
Their first and last experience with the internet is on Facebook and they know
nothing else.
While we’ve been busy fighting
for net neutrality, Facebook has essentially pre-empted the idea of
it in emerging countries. Who needs net neutrality when you’re providing the
best of the internet, for free, inside your own platform?
That’s Facebook’s logic at least; it completely owns
those people’s eyeballs. Nobody is challenging it in those countries.
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