Facebook: Spinning off Messenger was a good move, and here's why
Image: Collision
Some Facebook users hate change — that's just fact.
Roll out a radically revamped News Feed or tinker too much with
privacy settings, and a subset of users inevitably cry foul. That's what
happened when Facebook made its standalone Messenger app a mandatory download
last year for people who wanted to continue sending text-based messages
through the social network. This "family of apps" approach, Facebook
said, was done for the benefit of users, so that each app could offer a
richer, more focused experience.
Stan Chudnovsky, Messenger's head of product, suggests that if
Facebook had kept Messenger a part of its main app, it wouldn't be as
full an experience. Features such as video calling, introduced last
week, would go unnoticed by users.
"If
Messenger were still buried within the main app, video calling would be
buried within that, and it just wouldn’t ever find the light of day,"
Chudnovsky said on Tuesday at this year's
Collision tech conference in Las Vegas. "You’d never be thinking about
that particular part of the Facebook app as a place where you could have
a video conversation with somebody."
Since Facebook's controversial decision last August, the Messenger
team has been on a tear, tweaking and retrofitting its services with new
features, including peer-to-peer payments, customer-service features
and video chat. At this year's F8 Developer Conference in March,
Facebook officially opened up Messenger as a platform, so third-party developers could add features of their own: animated GIFs, wacky emoji and the like.
"The expressions, stickers and other stuff is very important for the
wide array of people we are talking to," said Chudnovsky, who joined
Facebook from PayPal in February. "It helps make them more expressive
and gives them the ability to do things easier."
The team's recent attempts are clearly part of an aggressive strategy
to grow Messenger as a service separate from the main Facebook
experience. Over 600 million people regularly use Messenger each month —
that's more than three times the user base it had less than a year ago,
according to Chudnovsky.
"These are not just people who downloaded the app, and forgot about it; they use it monthly, and in most cases every single day," he added.
Nonetheless, that's still less than half of Facebook's total 1.44 billion users, a huge disparity however you slice it.
Getting there means beefing up the Messenger experience to attract
and appeal to as broad a demographic as possible — from the younger
emoji-loving, GIF-happy, Snapchat set, to thirty-plus folks just seeking
a flexible, all-purpose messaging app, and even those Facebook users
who were turned off by the idea of downloading a separate messaging app
altogether.
"The goal is absolutely to close that gap: to get to 1.44 [billion] people and beyond to use Messenger," Chudnovsky said.
So, Messenger's "very small" team of 100-plus employees, as well as a
growing number of third-party developers on the Messenger platform,
continue to experiment.
When asked whether Messenger's video-calling feature could develop
into group video chat à la Google Hangout or live video streaming for
the masses (read: Periscope and Meerkat), Chudnovsky didn't outright
deny the possibility, but didn't hint at much either.
"We’re looking and learning," he said. "But where we’re going to take it, we don’t know."
Source: Mashable
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