Former Facebook Director Donald Graham says that regulation of Google and Facebook will slow them down dramatically and probably impair their futures significantly. He said that the idea that companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook are permanent just isn’t so. However, Graham believes strongly that Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are the two people that can fix Facebook.
Should Facebook Move To a Paid Subscription Model?
I don’t see another model that remotely could build today’s Facebook. Facebook, ever since its inception, ever since the earliest days and the earliest years, has inspired a lot of emotion and a lot of emotional reactions. My feeling when one of these things happens is we should take a deep breath, we should think about what we ourselves use Facebook for.
Google you need to use. Amazon you often need use. Apple you either need one of their phones or the competitors phones. Nobody needs to go on Facebook unless they find it enjoyable or useful and I find I continue to find it both. That does not diminish the importance of the misuse of the platform by Russian and other state actors in 2016. Facebook’s got a big job cleaning it up and despite what some of the things that have been said I believe as strongly as I can in the two people working to fix it.
Regulation of Google and Facebook Will Impair Their Futures
Everybody is waving their arms at them, at the tech companies right now, and screaming that they need to be regulated. I have a sort of troglodyte view here, I think any regulation of the likes of Google and Facebook will slow them down dramatically, probably impair their futures significantly. When companies are going very very well, as Google has been for years, as Apple and Amazon have been, and as Facebook has been, there’s a tendency to view them as permanent and that isn’t so.
When I was starting out in business, IBM was the colossus that you couldn’t do anything about and then Microsoft was. Business changes. Does Facebook have a long run in front of it? That will have a lot to do with the way they handle these issues and the public perception of the company. I don’t think that’s guaranteed.
This is the city where nothing happens. It may be that the regulation of social media companies is an exception and Congress can somehow pull itself together and pass a bill, but it’s usually wise to bet the other side. There may be some regulation of Facebook, there’s certainly this Honest Ads Act that Facebook has sort of pre-adopted. I think it’s a very good thing and that’s an example of something that could be done.
Internet entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis suggests that Facebook may go the way of AOL and Yahoo. “This could be, it’s possible, maybe not probable but possible, this could be their AOL peak, their Yahoo peak,” said Calacanis. “I think this could be peak Facebook right now.”
Jason Calacanis, Internet entrepreneur and angel investor in over 150 startups including Uber, Evernote, and Tumblr, discussed the current Facebook crisis on CNBC:
This is a Pretty Serious Crisis
This is a pretty serious crisis. If you look at the stakeholders involved, shareholders obviously no longer want to hold the stock and you’re seeing the stock collapse. If you look at employee morale it’s incredibly low. Founders who sold their company to Facebook, to Zuckerberg, and made billions of dollars have been incredibly critical of Mark Zuckerberg, which is pretty incredible when you think about it. You give somebody a couple of billion dollars and then they criticize you on the way out the door, it’s pretty unheard of.
Advertisers Still Love the Platform
But advertisers still love the platform. Anecdotally, the companies I work with, private companies, it is the only game in town to reach users at this level of scale. One has to wonder if the fourth constituent, which is governments around the world, are going to put up with their democracies being compromised. You put those four stakeholders together and this is a true crisis for Facebook.
This could be, it’s possible, maybe not probable but possible, this could be their AOL peak, their Yahoo peak. Those companies peaked with hundreds of millions of users, and in AOL’s case 30 million plus paid users, and it took a decade or two for those companies to deprecate.
People Are Realizing That This is Not a Positive for Society
Facebook’s on a whole different scale with two and a half billion people, so I don’t think they’re going anywhere anytime soon. The advertisers still love it and the advertisers are going to always go to the platform that has the lowest customer acquisition cost. But this is a crisis amongst the executives and the people who work there and I think people are starting to realize that net-net this is not a positive for society. Put it all together and you don’t want to own the stock and you don’t want to work at the company, so that’s pretty dark when you think about it.
This Could Be Peak Facebook Right Now
I don’t know that there’s an easy solution other than grinding it out for the next three or four years just like they did with the mobile problem. They couldn’t figure out mobile advertising and they figured that out so maybe they’ll figure this out. But I think this could be peak Facebook right now.
A recent Congressional hearing revealed that Facebook’s policies regarding fake news and posts that encourage violence need to be revamped. Now the social media giant is finally taking steps that will allow the platform to take down hateful and violence-inciting posts.
Facebook said that it will utilize its image recognition technology to target posts and status updates that were created or shared with the goal of “contributing to or exacerbating violence or physical harm.” Posts that fall under this category will be flagged and removed.
Facebook will begin taking down fake news intended to encourage violence https://t.co/AT6LwNgXDX
Facebook will reportedly be assisted by local and global organizations in spotting and verifying these fake items. Other groups might even be called in to confirm whether the information being spread is false or not.
The company’snew policy is a response to the vicious attacks on Muslims in India, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka after fake news against the group circulated on Facebook.
A spokesperson for the company said this new rule will be implemented in the coming months and will cover both image and text posts.
However, only posts that encourage physical harm or violence will be taken down. Fake news that doesn’t fall into this category will just be de-emphasized in the News Feed. The company explained in a statement that reducing the spread of misinformation “strikes the right balance between free expression and a safe and authentic community.”
Facebook’s new policy is a sticky proposition in itself as the company wants to give people a platform to voice their opinions while also keeping the user community safe. But finding this balance will be challenging.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has already found himself on the defensive when he cited Holocaust denial as a type of post that does not deserve to be taken down.
Hours after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was quoted saying some Holocaust deniers who post on Facebook aren’t “intentionally getting it wrong,” he tried to clarify his comments https://t.co/SxrdJTCesipic.twitter.com/0H3cs2gJwU
The ensuing uproar caused Zuckerberg to clarify his comments. He explained that while he finds denying the Holocaust to be offensive personally, the platform’s goal is “not to prevent anyone from saying something untrue – but to stop fake news and misinformation spreading across [its] services.”
There’s an outstanding rumor that Facebook users would have to pay in order to keep using the service. While this rumor has been going on for years, it might soon find itself becoming a truth if Sheryl Sandberg’s recent interviews are to be believed.
Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer is on a media blitz trying to do some damage control after the data breach that affected a staggering 87 million users. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has already given interviews about the Cambridge Analytica fiasco and is set to testify before Congress next week.
Sandberg recently appeared on NBC for a sit-down interview and was asked by Savannah Guthrie if Facebook could develop a tool, like an opt-out button, that allows users to specifically inform the company that they don’t want their personal profile information to be used for advertising.
Sandberg said that while the social media giant has various forms of opt-out, they “don’t have an opt-out at the highest level. If the company would ever develop such a tool, it would likely be a paid product.
However, there’s no concrete indication that Facebook has plans to roll out such a feature. But what makes Sandberg’s answer more interesting is how it more or less confirms what everyone knows—that the company’s revenue lies almost exclusively on keeping an eye on its account holder’s behavior and preferences. And if one were to take away that option, the only recourse for the company is to replace ad sales with subscriptions.
Sandberg also emphasized that selling user data is not how Facebook generates revenue and that the company doesn’t give personal data to advertisers. But she also pointed out that people come to Facebook to do targeted ads which are crucial for small businesses.
“We take those ads, we show them, and we don’t pass any individual information back to the advertiser,” Facebook’s COO said.
While Facebook does follow a supposedly “free” business model, the company still relies on advertisers to make it a free service. However, these advertisers do require something in exchange – the information that people share.
This information is also becoming increasingly valuable if Facebook’s latest data on average revenue per user is to be believed. Based on the available data from Facebook, American or Canadian users are worth about $26.76 while account holders in Europe cost around $8.86.
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, Facebook revealed that Cambridge Analytica was able to access personal data of up to 87 million users. The figure was shockingly higher than the previous estimate of 50 million.
The number was shared by the company’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, in a blog post. Schroepfer wrote that they “believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people – mostly in the US – may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.”
Last month the personaldata of almost 50 million Facebook users were unethically shared with Cambridge Analytica, a data company that worked on President Donald Trump’s campaign.
The huge discrepancy between the new figures and initial estimates was surprising, although Facebook’s head Mark Zuckerberg tried to downplay it a bit, saying that he’s confident the final tally of affected users will be lower than 87 million.
Zuckerberg is expected toappear before Congress on April 11 to discuss how Facebook manages the personal data and privacy of its 2-billion strong social media platform. Facebook’s CEO was also invited to appear before a committee of the UK parliament but he declined and just sent a deputy.
Facebook also posted another blog post stating that it had found and deleted almost 300 additional Instagram and Facebook accounts and pages with ties to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a propaganda group working out of Russia.
Schroepfer’s blog post also confirmed several privacy updates, like the scrapping of phone numbers and email addresses being used to search for people on the social network. The company believes that due to “the scale and sophistication” of activities they’ve uncovered, the feature made it possible for information found on their public profile to be scrapped.
The blog also revealed that starting April 9, Facebook users will be able to check if their data was exposed to Cambridge Analytica. The disclosure on the data mining firm will reportedly appear at the top of users’ News Feed.
In the midst of the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook recently announced that it will put an end to its Partner Categories program. The move effectively cuts off third-party access to the social media giant’s data.
Facebook utilizes data from third-party data collectors to augment its own data pool for ad targeting. The company also allowed advertisers totarget consumers using data collated from several sources, including Facebook, the advertiser itself and third-party services like Acxiom and Experian.
Third-party data has been useful to companies and advertisers that do not have their own customer data. However, the Cambridge Analytica affair proved that Facebook has very little control over how these data collectors get their data, which makes using it is quite risky.
In a truncated statement attributed to Facebook’s product marketing director Graham Mudd, the company wanted to inform advertisers of its move to shut down Partner Categories, a feature thatallows third-party data providers to offer their targeting straight on Facebook. And while the company says it’s a common practice in the industry, they believe this step “will help improve people’s privacy on Facebook.”
The Partner Categories program started in 2013. It was borne by a partnership between the social media platform and big data brokers.
At the time of the program’s launch, the company assured its users that they’re very serious about privacy. But in light of what happened with Cambridge Analytica, it seems Facebook is re-evaluating its stance. Aside from the announcement about third-party access, the company has also updated its privacy control settings.
The move to restrict access to user data stems from Mark Zuckerberg’s promise last week. Facebook’s founder said in a post that the company has “a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you. I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Lawmakers from the United States and Britain are heaping criticisms on Facebook and founder Mark Zuckerberg after reports revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data company said to have been instrumental in Donald Trump’s presidential win, received data from 50 million Facebook users through inappropriate means.
The social media giant announced on Friday that it suspended Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) and Cambridge Analytica, its data analytics arm, for violating Facebook’s Terms of Service. It was alleged that the two companies gathered and shared the personal data of around 50 million Facebook users without consent.
Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth dropped $5 billion following news that data firm Cambridge Analytica, which had ties to Trump’s campaign, reportedly accessed information from about 50 million Facebook users https://t.co/989OHGqcSFpic.twitter.com/6cUtZsc3Lc
The decision to suspend SCL and Cambridge Analytica came one day beforeThe New York Times and The Observer came out with reports detailing how Cambridge Analytica acquired and utilized private information of millions of Facebook users to develop voter profiles that were used to design highly targeted political ads during the last US Presidential Elections.
Cambridge Analytica is partly owned by Richard Mercer, a billionaire who was previously involved in Ted Cruz’ 2015 presidential campaign before assisting Donald Trump’s presidential bid in 2016. The company was supposedly brought in by Trump’s campaign team to assist with its digital operations, which was being headed by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.
Facebook has admitted that the data Cambridge Analytica received came from Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology professor from the University of Cambridge, who designed an app that gave him permission to access the personal information of the users as well as that of their friends.
According to Facebook, Kogan gained access to the data legitimately and “through the proper channels that governed all developers” on the platform at the time. But afterward, Kogan passed the data he gathered to Cambridge Analytica. This was a clear breach of the social media’s regulations.
A former employee of Cambridge apparently said to the Times that the information collected from Facebook became the basis of “its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.”
Cambridge Analytica’s suspension, coupled with The Observer and The New York Times reports, garnered someharsh reactions from lawmakers. Massachusetts’ Attorney General Maura Healey has said her office will investigate this situation while several congressmen want Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear and testify before their committees.
U.K. Commons Committee on digital media wants Mark Zuckerberg to testify about Cambridge Analytica and data collection. pic.twitter.com/nRhLSRc31P
It’s not just American lawmakers who are unhappy with Zuckerberg and his company. Their British counterparts are also demanding that Zuckerberg or another senior executive talk to them about the alleged data breach and the continued risk to user’s personal information.
UK lawmaker Damian Collins said the company’s previous representatives gave “false assurance” that Facebook’s policies are strong and well-managed. But now he wants Zuckerberg to “stop hiding behind his Facebook page and actually come out and answer questions about his company.”
Facebook saw a decline in usage for the first time in its history, undoubtedly brought about by certain changes made to its News Feed. Despite that, the social media company’s digital ads remained profitable, stemming any concerns investors might have.
Facebook recently released its earnings report for the last quarter of 2017. The report underlined the effects of Mark Zuckerberg’s campaign to improve his company while also emphasizing the social media giant is still aforce to be reckoned with in the business sector.
Facebook’s founder mentioned in the report how the company made changes so that fewer viral videos were shown. The changes “reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day.” Those hours showed up as a decrease from 185 million daily active users (DAU) in the US and Canada to 184 million users.
It’s the first time that the company has reported a reduction of users in any of its market. Some sectors could evenhave been alarmed by the fact that this decline happened in the region where Facebook earns the most from advertisements. The company makes an average profit of $26.76 per user in the region, as opposed to the worldwide average of $6.18.
However, the reported dip in users and time spent on the social media platform didn’t seem to hurt Facebook’s bottom line. According to the company’s earnings report, revenue in the last quarter of 2017 hit $12.97 billion, up from the $8.81 billion it garnered during the same period in 2016. This was an increase of 47% and it topped the $12.55 billion average projected by the analysts over at Yahoo Finance.
The boost was apparently due to Facebook’s mobile ad sales, which included that from its sister company Instagram. The increase was also aided by the company’s marketing tools, which are steadily becoming more precise.
Revenue from its mobile ad sales represented around 89% of the last quarter’s total ad sales and is up to 84% compared to the year before. It has been estimated that Facebook’s profits from its global ads this year would reach $53.84 billion, placing it behind Google as the biggest ad seller in the world.
More changes are expected to come to Facebook, as Zuckerberg wants it to be more than just a fun platform. In his statement, he said he wanted his brainchild to also be “good for people’s well-being and for society” and plans to do so via more meaningful connections.
He parlayed any concerns investors might have by saying that theuser drop was just temporary and was needed to make a stronger product. Zuckerberg also emphasized that worthwhile interactions would lead to a stronger community and that the care users would have for this group would make them more amenable to seeing ads.
Thanks to 2017 being a banner year for a host of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum, everyone on Earth is now aware of the existence of these digital assets. Buoyed by the massive market gains last year, cryptocurrencies, in general, seemed to have passed the litmus test to qualify as a legitimate investment vehicle. With its success, a number of institutional investors have already joined the fray, grabbing up virtual assets to diversify their portfolios.
However, Bitcoins viability as an investment option is not the only exciting part of the equation. Apparently, even big tech companies are amazed at the Bitcoin model and are now looking for ways to adapt the technology behind the cryptocurrency to improve their own businesses.
In particular, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg looks up to the Bitcoin model seeing it a possible solution to problems that Facebook, and the internet in its entirety, are facing today. As Zuckerberg puts it, the internet today is way too centralized, controlled only by a handful of tech giants including Facebook. Now, Zuckerberg wants to study technologies such as encryption and the blockchain as possible means of decentralizing internet control.
Back in the 1990s during the early years of the internet, many view it as a way to decentralize power – to put “power in people’s hands” as Zuckerberg puts it in his Facebook post. However, the opposite has happened and, today, internet control is so centralized that a few corporations can make sweeping decisions that will affect all netizens. Furthermore, even governments use the technology to spy on its citizens, a far cry from the original promise that heralded the internet as the place where people can be free from any form of political interference.
“But today, many people have lost faith in that promise,” Zuckerberg noted.
“ With the rise of a small number of big tech companies—and governments using technology to watch their citizens—many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it.”
— Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO
The way Zuckerberg sees it, one way to redress the imbalance is to use technologies that are counter-trends to this centralization. This includes encryption as well as cryptocurrencies, technological trends that seem to have the ability to “take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands.”
At the moment, Zuckerberg is just planning to use the technology behind Bitcoin to improve user experience on the social media platform. But of course, it does not mean that he won’t allow Bitcoin itself to be an accepted mode of payment for transactions done via Facebook.
After all, Facebook also harbors ambitions to enter into eCommerce, an area that is currently dominated by well-entrenched rival Amazon. By accepting the popular Bitcoin as Facebook’s currency, the move could unlock the huge eCommerce potential of Facebook’s more than a billion active users.
Facebook recently admitted what a lot of people have long suspected—that social media can be bad for you. It’s a ballsy move, considering that Mark Zuckerberg and company have built an empire based on the largest social media platform in the world.
Facebook made the startling admission on a company blog post titled Hard Questions: Is Spending Time on Social Media Bad for Us?
According to Facebook researchers David Ginsberg and Moira Burke, users who “spend a lot of time passively consuming information—reading but not interacting with people—report feeling worse afterward.” In other words, users who just scroll through news feeds, click on links, “like” posts, or share status updates without really engaging with others feel less satisfied with their Facebook experience. The post even linked back to a study that revealed users who clicked on links and “likes” more than the average user are more prone to physical and mental distress.
The premise is hardly shocking. Researchers from the National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health from the University of Melbourne have stated that there’s a link between social media usage and anxiety, depression, eating issues, and sleep problems. Meanwhile, a survey has found that sites like Instagram are aggravating young people’s body image and confidence issues.
Is More Social Media the Answer?
Despite Facebook’s admission thatsocial media might be detrimental to you, it also said that the platform can also do you a lot of good. But that would entail doing more on Facebook than just clicking on Like. As it turns out, having more in-depth interaction on Facebook can do wonders for your self-esteem and social standing. And by more interaction, the post’s authors mean reacting, sharing ideas, posting comments, and engaging in discussions with other Facebook users.
Ginsberg and Burke also mentioned another study that showed a more positive finding. Said study showed that Facebook users who posted comments and joined give-and-take discussions on the service felt better about the experience.
As the Facebook post stated, sharing status updates is not enough, “people had to interact one-on-one with others in their network.”
It appears that Facebook, in essence, is saying that how you feel about the platform depends on how you use it. And if you want to have a better experience, perhaps you should be using it more often and interacting with other users on a deeper level.
Incidentally, the blog post also revealed a number of new and upcoming changes that will reportedly encourage more interactions between Facebook account holders and maybe cause them to spend more hours on the social media platform.
Facebook have acknowledged, for the first time, that social media can negatively impact your mental health.
At the end of the day though, Facebook is still a business. Its shareholders have visions for expansion and profit. Admitting that their product is bad is not good for business. Pushing for a bigger and better Facebook is better.
Still, kudos to the Zuckerberg and his team for doing their best to improve social media’s impact on the world. The company has been facing some heat over how people use its product, especially after the last U.S. presidential election and the proliferation of fake news.
Nothing gets a geek’s dander up than a discussion of whether a Skynet-like AI will become part of our future, as seen in the beef apparently brewing between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
The two billionaires have opposing views with regards to artificial intelligence. While Musk is known for issuing warnings regarding the dangers of artificial intelligence, Facebook’s CEO has expressed optimism on how AI can improve people’s lives. A mindset that Tesla’s chief thinks is a pretty “limited” understanding of the topic.
The word war apparently started after Zuckerberg conducted a Facebook Live session. As he relaxed at home and manned the grill, the tech icon answered various question, including one about AI.
According to Zuckerberg, people who keep trying to drum up fear of AI are “really negative” and “pretty irresponsible.” He emphasized that any technology, including AI, can be used for either good or bad and that it’s up to designers and developers to be careful of what they create.
Zuckerberg added that he has a hard time understanding those who are against the development and evolution of AI technology, saying that these people are “arguing against safer cars that aren’t going to have accidents” and “against being able to better diagnose people when they’re sick.”
It’s safe to assume that Tesla’s boss was among those people Zuckerberg is talking about. Musk met a group of US governors earlier this month and proposed that regulations on artificial intelligence should be enacted.
Musk explained that AI technology posed a huge risk to society, hinting at a future similar to what the Terminator movies have implied.
“I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react, because it seems so ethereal,” Musk said then.
Upon hearing Zuckerberg’s comments on AI, Musk hit back on Twitter, saying that he has talked to his contemporary about this. He also said that Zuckerberg’s “understanding of the subject is limited.”
However, Zuckerberg is sticking to his guns as he once more defended his views on AI in a recent Facebook post. He reiterated his optimism about AI and the technology’s potential to improve the world.
Facebook is finally bringing monetization to videos that are posted by its users, letting video makers include mid-roll ads, according to Recode. “Industry sources say the social network is going to start testing a new “mid-roll” ad format, which will give video publishers the chance to insert ads into their clips after people have watched them for at least 20 seconds.”
Facebook is careful to match the same ad payout to publishers (55%) as YouTube, which we suspect is to avoid an ad payment war with its video platform rival. Facebook will differentiate its videos by serving a mid-roll ad instead of the dreaded pre-roll that most videos include. However, on YouTube the pre-roll ads can be discontinued by clicking “skip ad” after 5 seconds. It will be interesting to see if Facebook offers a similar way to end the ad interruption.
Facebook has been focused on video for the last few years, and at one point a Facebook executive said that “Facebook will be all video within 5 years.”
“Over the past six months we have been particularly focused on Live video. Live represents a new way to share what’s happening in more immediate and creative ways,” Zuckerberg said earlier this year. “This quarter Candace Payne’s Chewbacca mask video was viewed almost 160 million times.”
Not everybody is happy about Facebook’s video advertising plans:
Even more reason not to watch video. Advertisers won’t be happy until web video is as dire as US TV experience. https://t.co/ugtpLQp7Yy
Ugh. Mid-roll ads 20 seconds into Fb videos could turn the start of videos into annoying "here's why you should keep watching!" previews https://t.co/b1qlBDaLr6
Mark Zuckerberg has posted his 2017 personal challenge, and it’s pretty easy compared to his previous challenges such as running 365 miles, building an system AI for his home or learning Mandarin. This year he’s committed to visiting the 30 states he hasn’t been to yet and meeting people that are working and living in those states.
“My personal challenge for 2017 is to have visited and met people in every state in the US by the end of the year,” writes Zuckerberg. “I’ve spent significant time in many states already, so I’ll need to travel to about 30 states this year to complete this challenge. After a tumultuous last year, my hope for this challenge is to get out and talk to more people about how they’re living, working and thinking about the future.”
He said that he and his wife Priscilla have visited many cities throughout the world in 2016 and now are “excited to explore more of our country and meet more people here” in the US. He seems to be reacting to the election somewhat when he writes about a “greater sense of divsion.”
“Going into this challenge, it seems we are at a turning point in history. For decades, technology and globalization have made us more productive and connected. This has created many benefits, but for a lot of people it has also made life more challenging. This has contributed to a greater sense of division than I have felt in my lifetime. We need to find a way to change the game so it works for everyone.”
“My work is about connecting the world and giving everyone a voice,” said Zuckerberg. “I want to personally hear more of those voices this year. It will help me lead the work at Facebook and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative so we can make the most positive impact as the world enters an important new period.”
“My trips this year will take different forms — road trips with Priscilla, stops in small towns and universities, visits to our offices across the country, meetings with teachers and scientists, and trips to fun places you recommend along the way.”
“I’ve enjoyed doing these challenges with our community and I’ll post tomorrow about how everyone around the world can join in. I’m looking forward to this challenge and I hope to see you out there!”
Zuckerberg was recently asked what he thinks are the top 3 qualities an entrepreneur should have when starting a successful business.
1. Focus on Making an Impact in the World
“I think if you want to build something great you should focus on the changes you want to make in the world. That to me is number 1. I see too many entrepreneurs decide that they want to start a company before they actually know what it is that they want to build, and to me that seems backwards.”
“In building a company you are going to change a lot and you are going to learn a lot along the way, so it really makes sense to go in with an idea about what the impact is that you want to make and not just that you want to have a bunch of people working for you or that you just want to start a company.”
2. No One Does It Alone
“The second is that no one does it alone. You need to build the best team that you can. There’s this myth in the world of the founder or the individual. For instance, a lot of people talk about me and Facebook and it drives me a little crazy because I think this understates that this is a big team effort. We have thousands of people working on Facebook now and even at the beginning there were a bunch of people working on it.”
“When you look at most big things that get done in the world they are not done by one person. You are going to need to build a team. You go in with the idea of what you want to do in the world and the next most important thing you are going to do is to surround yourself with the best people that you can to learn from.”
“You are going to need to learn over time and you are going to need people with complimentary skills because no matter how talented you are there are just going to be things that you don’t bring to the table. That’s certainly true for me. Our company works because we have a really talented core team of people who compliment me that have different skills that I don’t have.”
3. Persistence!
“The third thing is just persistence. Nothing ever goes the way you want it to. People talk about overnight success and that’s not the way it works. Overnight success only happens after you’ve worked for a long period of time to build something and then one day you wake up and people say, “Oh this is successful,” like it just appeared. That’s never how you experience it when you are actually working on it.”
“When you are building something you go through all these trials and tribulations along the way and I think a lot of people simply give up. And that takes different forms, you don’t push through to what you believe, some people sell their company before it reaches its full potential, some change the direction and some people leave.”
“I think that the biggest things that have gotten done in the world tend to be done by people who primarily believe in a mission and are not trying to just build a company, by teams and not by individuals and by people who just don’t give up.”
Facebook’s goal is to connect with everyone, yes every single person in the world. Not just that, but Facebook wants to connect to everyone at all times, in every waking moment. Facebook envisions a future where you will always be engaging with some part of the Facebook ecosystem, whether it’s on its mega social platform at Facebook, using it’s search engine, messaging a business associate or communicating on video or via a virtual reality environment.
But first lets talk business.
“I often talk about how when we develop new products we think about it in three phases, said Zuckerberg. “First, building a consumer use case. Then, second, making it so that people can organically interact with businesses. And then third, on top of that, once there’s a large volume of people interacting with businesses, give businesses tools to reach more people and pay. And that’s ultimately the business opportunity.”
During the earnings call yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg opened the curtain into Facebook’s plans, strategies and dreams for the future. He first provided the latest metrics illustrating Facebook’s continued success, 1.7 billion people now use Facebook every month, and 1.1 billion people use it every day. He said that Facebook revenue grew by 59% year-over year to $6.4 billion, and advertising revenue was up 63% to $6.2 billion.
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook said that Q2 ad revenue grew 63% and mobile ad revenue hit $5.2 billion, up 81% year-over-year, and was approximately 84% of total ad revenue. Facebook is now truly a mobile app rather than a desktop experience for the vast majority of its users.
Zuckerberg said that they continue to see excellent growth and over the past year Facebook has added over 200 million people using Facebook on a monthly basis. Time spent per person increased double digit percentages year-over-year across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. And that doesn’t even include WhatsApp yet.
Facebook is still growing rapidly and that’s because it has continued to evolve. It’s evolution has happened because of increased bandwidth, technological advancements, acquisitions of new platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram and most importantly continuing to be on the cutting edge of what people want in a social network. All of this while simultaneously building a successful business model that pays for this evolution.
What’s really interesting however, is how Zuckerberg sees Facebook transforming in the future. “Our results show our progress as we work to make the world more open and connected across our three-, five- and ten-year horizons,” he said. “Over the next three years we are focused on continuing to build our community and help people share more of what matters to them. The next five years are about building our newer products into full ecosystems with developers and businesses. And over the next ten years we are working to build new technologies to help everyone connect in new ways.”
Facebook is seeking to be the world’s business platform, not just the peoples. More on this below in the Search section on a Facebook future where it is competing with LinkedIn.
“We’re excited to announce that we now have 60 million monthly active business Pages on Facebook,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. “We also continue to grow the number of active advertisers on our platform. This shows that both our free and paid products are providing value to marketers of all sizes around the world. We continue to focus on our three priorities — capitalizing on the shift to mobile, growing the number of marketers using our ad products, and making our ads more relevant and effective.”
Trust me, this is just the beginning of Facebook’s morphing into both a personal and business platform in the future.
The Future of Facebook is Video
Facebook used to be mostly text and over the years they changed to be photo centric, with many people using Facebook as their family photo album. People still do that but Zuckerberg envisions a huge change coming. “We see a world that is video first, with video at the heart of all of our apps and services.”
“Over the past six months we have been particularly focused on Live video. Live represents a new way to share what’s happening in more immediate and creative ways,” Zuckerberg said. “This quarter Candace Payne’s Chewbacca mask video was viewed almost 160 million times. Live is also changing the way we see politics, as news organizations and delegates go Live from the Republican and Democratic conventions. And we have seen in Minnesota and Dallas how Live can shine a light on important moments as they happen.”
At Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London, Nicola Mendelsohn, VP EMEA at Facebook, predicted that the Facebook newsfeed will be all video in 5 years. “It will definitely be mobile. It will probably be all video,” Mendelsohn said. “I just think if we look, we already are seeing a year on year decline in text. We’re seeing a massive increase as I’ve said on both pictures and video. So yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say video, video, video.”
“When you think about what’s happening on video on our platform we’re really excited by the production and consumption of video and we’re seeing the full range from people posting the things in their personal lives; the power of what a mobile phone can produce and distribute now is pretty incredible when you compare it to just a few years ago to some of the most sophisticated content producers in the world producing for us,” added Sandberg.
Facebook Focuses on Search
Facebook is moving into the search space aggressively, definitely to help it compete with Twitter and perhaps even Google in the future. Facebook launched true keyword search in late 2014 that allows users to search not just profile names or just your friends posts, but also everyone’s public posts. And, if you didn’t know, all postings default at public, which means that anyone can search for your posts.
The first goal for Facebook with search is to become more like Twitter, where people post their thoughts, feelings and most importantly news reports, especially the on-the-scene kind. When the next plane lands in the Hudson, Facebook wants the survivor standing on the wing to use their platform to post about this breaking news, not Twitter. More precisely, Facebook wants you to use Facebook Live to stream your personalized live news coverage.
“We’re making good progress on core services within the Facebook app, like Search,” Zuckerberg stated. “A growing way people use search is to find what people are saying about a topic across the more than 2.5 trillion posts in our network. Now, people are doing more than 2 billion searches a day, between looking up people, businesses and other things that they care about. Continuous, steady improvement to services like search are an important part of helping people connect and realizing our mission.”
He also said this in minimizing their true plans, in my opinion.
So I’d say we’re around the second phase of that in search now. We have a pretty big navigational use case where people look up people and pages and groups that they want to get to and look at and search. One of the big growing use cases that we’re investing a lot in is looking up the content in the ecosystem and that is an area that we’re very excited about which helps people find more content.
But certainly there’s a reasonable amount of behavior in there which is looking for things that over time could be monetizeable or commercial intense and at some point we will probably want to work on that but we’re still in the phase of just making it easier for people to find all the content they want and connect with businesses organically.
But what’s their next goal? Facebook has certainly focused on the business use of their platform as they continue to look for monetization opportunities. My guess is that Facebook will seek to compete with LinkedIn as the business platform of record.
Over the last few years LinkedIn has certainly moved from a glorified directory of business professionals to a platform for business related news, conversation and connection. Facebook has the platform but would need to figure out how to easily separate family life from business life, which could be done rather easily. With Microsoft buying LinkedIn, Facebook will be highly motivated to compete.
Google tried to compete with Facebook with Google+ and it failed miserably, but that’s because it’s harder to get people to change their social habits than it is their search habits. You don’t need your friends to use Facebook Search in order for you to find it useful, but you definitely need your friends to move to a new social platform to make it work for you. That was Google’s dilemma, but it won’t be Facebook’s.
“Since it refocused on keywords, Facebook is now seeing 2 billion searches per day of its 2.5 trillion posts,” stated TechCrunch writer Josh Constine. “That’s compared to 1.5 billion searches per day in July 2015, and 1 billion in September 2012. That’s a 33% climb in just 9 months.”
That’s lets than half a reported 3.5 billion searches per day on Google. The difference is that Google’s searches are monitizable, while Facebook searches, not so much. However, this must scare the heck out of Google because it shows how ingrained people are to use Facebook for search. Therefore, over time I predict that Facebook will add web indexing to it’s search engine. They already have 3.5 billion searches, why not open up search to everything and in the process open up a huge monetization opportunity.
One other prediction, Facebook will disconnect its search app from just Facebook.com, just like they did Messenger. Then, voilà, Facebook is competing with Google.
Making Instagram Stronger
Instagram was purchased by Facebook for $1 billion while it was just getting off the ground. It is now center to its plans on connecting with everyone in the world on a constant always on basis. That’s why Instagram is so important to Facebook, it has a foothold with younger people and its active user base is not a clone of Facebook’s, so it expands the corporate Facebook’s universe of connectivity and engagement.
“Over the next five years we are working hard to build ecosystems around some of our newer products,” said Zuckerberg. “Instagram now has more than 500 million monthly actives, with more than 300 million daily. Now we’re working to make the experience more engaging.”
He said that when Instagram, despite user pushback, began to rank its feed in order to improve the experience, that they are already seeing a “positive impact” with people spending more time and share more content within the platform.
As always, business is important to Zuckerberg as well. “We’ve also introduced our advertising tools on Instagram and we’re seeing marketers engage with people in creative and innovative ways.”
Messaging with Messenger & WhatsApp
“In the two years since we separated Messenger from the main Facebook app — which was a controversial decision at the time — we’ve improved performance and given people new ways to express themselves,” commented Zuckerberg. “Now, for the first time, more than 1 billion people are using Messenger every month.”
Facebook sees a huge opportunity with messaging because it moves them closer to their goal of connecting everyone on a constant always on basis. That’s why they paid $22 billion for WhatsApp, which is a service that barely had a business model.
“I’m also happy with the updates we’re making to WhatsApp — which also has a community of more than 1 billion people,” said Zuckerberg. “This quarter we launched new desktop apps and end-to-end encryption, and millions of people are using WhatsApp’s voice calling features.”
Facebook has big plans for messaging because not only does it help them bring even more people into Facebook’s universe, but it moves them into the business space, where Facebook desperately wants to be, because that’s where the money is.
“The scale we’ve achieved with our messaging services makes it clear that they are more than just a way to chat with friends,” Zuckerberg noted. “That’s why we’re also making it easier for people to connect with groups and businesses as well. We are going to keep focusing on this over the next several years.”
Facebook owned messaging has now taken over standard text messaging according to Zuckerberg.
“Between Messenger and WhatsApp I think we’re around 60 billion messages a day which is something like three times more than the peak of global SMS traffic.”
It’s incredible to think that Facebook now owns the messaging space. Who would have thought that 3 years ago?
New Technologies
“I’m also excited about the early progress we’re making on our 10-year initiatives,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during their recent earnings announcement. “We are investing in new technologies to give more people a voice — including the 4 billion people around the world who aren’t yet online — and helping more people take advantage of the opportunities that come with the internet.”
Facebook is seeking to connect everyone in the world, regardless of any obstacle. It’s a long term plan, but Facebook is on it.
“One of the biggest opportunities to grow our community is in developing countries where connectivity is less advanced than what we take for granted here at home,” Zuckerberg said. “So over the past couple of years, we’ve began making steady improvements to our apps to make them work regardless of the device or connection people are using. We also built a light-weight version of our Android app, called Facebook Lite, that is tuned to work on 2G networks and is now used by more than 100 million people.”
Virtual reality is another huge area of investment for Facebook, especially with their $2 billion purchase of Oculus. They see VR as an extension of connecting and sharing. Know one really knows the future of VR, but it will be deeply engrained in advertising in the future and since all of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising, they need to be in this space.
“We believe that virtual reality can help people share richer experiences and help everyone understand what’s going on around the world,” said Zuckerberg. “It’s really early for us in VR but we’re hitting some important milestones. As of the second quarter more than 1 million people a month are using Oculus on mobile phones through our Gear VR 4partnership with Samsung.”
Zuckerberg also commented on the potential revenue importance of their investment in VR:
“More than 300 apps are already available at the Oculus store for Gear VR, we’ve filled all of our pre-orders for Oculus Rift and we are seeing increasing demand from retail as stores plan for the holidays. While it’s still early for augmented reality, we’re doing AR research and are seeing lightweight versions of AR technology today in mobile apps like MSQRD.”
Facebook is Just Getting Started
“So that’s a recap of the progress we’re making in our 10 year plan,” said Zuckerberg. “We have a saying at Facebook that our journey is only 1% done — and while I’m happy with our progress, we have a lot more work to do to grow our community and connect the whole world. That means making big investments and taking risks — focusing not just on what Facebook is, but on what it can be.”
According to research by eMarketer, Facebook will receive 67.9% of all social media advertising revenue in 2016. The study predicts that Facebook will generate $22.37 billion in net ad revenues this year, up 30% from 2015 revenue of $17.08 billion. eMarketer says that 70% of this years revenue ($12.08 billion) will come from outside of the US.
“Facebook is seeing momentum across its ad business,” said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson. “On the branding side, video ads are becoming more and more popular for marketers whose objective is broad awareness. And products like Dynamic Ads, which let advertisers upload their product catalog to Facebook and then deliver relevant targeted ads, are proving highly effective for marketers that want to drive lower-funnel activities, such as purchases.”
eMarketer notes that this revenue growth is due entirely to ads on Facebook itself and that Facebook has not yet added monetization to Messenger, which it has been transitioning to a stand-alone app for the last couple of years. In June, Facebook announced that they mobile users would soon not be able to use Facebook Messenger without downloading the separate Messenger app.
Just last week, Facebook announced that Messenger is now being used by over 1 billion people, which matches the number of users that WhatsApp had as of February 2016, according to Statista.
“Messenger is gaining traction among marketers that want to experiment with chat bots,” said Williamson. “These are very early days for conducting business activities on Messenger, however, and it remains unclear just how important it will be as a marketing vehicle.”
Facebook has also not brought serious monetization to WhatsApp, which it purchased for $22 billion in 2014, or to Instagram, which it paid $1 billion for in 2012.
It’s very likely that once Facebook finds a way to monetize WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram their social revenues will significantly accelerate.
Another significant source of future ad revenue for Facebook are video ads, which Facebook may actually see as its future primary source of revenue. At Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London this past June, Nicola Mendelsohn, VP EMEA at Facebook, predicted that the Facebook newsfeed will be all video in 5 years. “It will definitely be mobile. It will probably be all video,” Mendelsohn said. “I just think if we look, we already are seeing a year on year decline in text. We’re seeing a massive increase as I’ve said on both pictures and video. So yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say video, video, video.”
Mark Zuckerberg recently conducted the first live video conversation with ALL Facebook users. “A few weeks ago I started off trying to do an internal live Q&A and I found it was so much more fun and engaging and I could see peoples comments as I was going,” Zuckerberg told millions that were live watching. “So rather than just having a few hundred or a few thousand people in a room we could do this here and we could have tens or hundreds of thousands of people participating in a town hall Q&A together all across the world.”
Facebook knows that video is remarkably effective for brand marketing. Remember the Chewbacca Mom video? Well, you might not remember that was originally a Facebook Live video and benefited Kohl’s immensely. Facebook and all of its social and messaging platforms are ripe for video advertising, and when Facebook goes all in with video, even TV networks won’t be able to compete with both its reach and its ability to micro target audiences.
Facebbook is liberal because it’s employees are mostly liberal. It’s employees trend young and young people are the driving force behind socialist Bernie Sanders, for instance. The median age of Facebook’s workforce is only 29 years old. Facebook is based in arguably in the most liberal city in the United States, San Francisco, an official sanctuary city that refuses to honor federal requests to hold on to people found to be in the country illegally. There is no denying that Facebook employees are liberal.
“I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as ‘others,’” Zuckerberg said, never referring to Trump by name. “I hear them calling for blocking free expression, for slowing immigration, for reducing trade, and in some cases, even for cutting access to the internet.”
Conservatives believe he is a liberal for plenty of reasons. He started and funds an organization called Fwd.us which openly bashes Trump and Cruz for their immigration positions:
Of course, Zuckerberg may also be just a pragmatist and a proponent of what is in the best interest of Facebook. Facebook needs the best tech people in the world and they are all not in the United States.
Some say that Zuckerberg is a globalist, which is something many conservatives resist, except for the conservatives that are executives in multi-national corporations. Globalist’s don’t care about fair trade, because arguing this could start a trade war which is not in their corporate interests. They want unhindered immigration and they don’t want much done on illegal immigration because that could end up putting more limits on legal immigration too. Zuckerberg, falls into this category not just because he’s a liberal, but because it is in his company’s best interest.
But Zuckerberg is liberal on hot-topic social issues too.
There was once a claim that Zuckerberg donated almost a billion dollars to Planned Parenthood, an organization that many Republican’s despise because of its pro-abortion agenda. What actually happened is that Zuckerberg donated $500 million in Facebook shares (Now possibly worth a billion!) to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, an organization that funds some liberal initiatives, but is not overtly political.
Mark Zuckerberg openly supports gay marriage, a liberal position that is supported by many younger conservatives as well. A Pew Research poll conducted in 2014 showed that 61% of young Republicans favor same-sex marriage. That’s likely much higher now considering that same sex marriage is now legal. In June, 2015 the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage.
After the Paris attacks by Muslim extremists Zuckerberg felt it necessary to post that Facebook supports Muslims:
If you’re a Muslim in this community, as the leader of Facebook I want you to know that you are always welcome here and that we will fight to protect your rights and create a peaceful and safe environment for you.
Manyconservatives find this an unsettling, but common knee-jerk reaction of liberals, every time radical Muslims commit an act of terror. Conservatives suspect that many Muslims around the world sympathies with the so-called extremest and that leaders, political and corporate, shouldn’t assume that most Muslims are just like us, freedom loving and peaceful. For instance, according to a Pew survey, a third of U.S. Muslims support Al-Qaeda and that more than a third of U.S. Muslims think Islamic extremism is okay!
In my opinion, there is no evidence of a top-down initiative to silence conservative voices.
Based on our research and my personal experience with Facebook, I believe they are acting in good faith and share some very deep, fundamental principles with people who believe in the principles of liberty and freedom of speech.
“Facebook is intentionally suppressing our traffic and hiding our stories in people’s newsfeeds,” said Patty McMurray, co-founder of the group 100% Fed Up. “[The censorship] has everything to do with immigration,” McMurray said.
“Every time I threaten to take legal action [against Facebook’s censorship], I get the same response: ‘Glitch. Mistake. Sorry.’” said anti-amnesty filmmaker Dennis Michael Lynch. “It is total censorship, and there is no question it is an effort by those at Facebook who want to muffle the sounds of people like myself.”
Yet more broadly, the activists say that Facebook suppresses their groups in multiple ways: such as unsubscribing followers, hiding the groups’ content from their followers’ newsfeeds, deleting posts, and suspending the advocates’ ability to post on their own Facebook pages.
McMurray says she was suspended from posting on her Facebook group’s page for a whole month because another Facebook user published a post on her group’s page. The outside post was critical of unassimilated Muslim migrants who push for the implementation of Sharia law in Western countries.
Facebook is the world’s largest platform of communication and news with 1.65 billion users, and as such has a tremendous influence. It has the right to be biased against conservatives but if it was open about this it might turn-off millions in its user base. So it’s simply smart business not to be biased, but with tens of thousands of employees that trend liberal, conservatives have a right to be watchful that their voices are not being silenced. Most assuredly, Zuckerberg would not want Facebook to be thought of as “Fakebook” — a jab that Rush Limbaugh frequently uses.
Mark Zuckerberg at least in Beck’s longing eyes is not biased and wants Facebook to not be biased against conservatives. Because of its potential for significant influence let’s hope that’s true. It’s not just in Facebook’s interest, it’s in the interest of the world.
At F8, Facebook announced that it is opening up the Live API, which will let developers build the ability to stream to Facebook Live from any device.
As part of the announcement, which came from Mark Zuckerberg himself, a drone floated above the stage. It’s using the API to stream from the conference to Facebook Live as the event goes on.
Facebook has already announced a ton of new Facebook Live-related features over the past week, and as the streaming service becomes integrated with more and more apps and devices, these (particularly the discoverability features) will become significantly more important.
Kurt Wagner makes a great point in that the API could “help entice bigger media players to go live, those that are used to producing video with a little more production power than a smartphone can capture.”
Product manager Daniel Danker discusses the API in a blog post:
Publishers with verified pages can get started with the Live API via Publishing Tools or by contacting one of our Media Solutions partners. These partners have built video production, editing, and streaming products that publish directly to Facebook Live and bring live video to life with features like camera switching, instant replay, on-screen graphics and special effects.
Developers can learn how to integrate directly with Facebook Live using the Live API Documentation. The Go Live Dialog makes it particularly easy to get started. If you’re a developer and would like to integrate Facebook Live directly with your app or device, sign up to request access.
The API can be used to build video streams that mix multiple video and audio sources and special effects. These can include programmatic sources including games and screencasts.
The API can also be used in combination with Facebook’s Graph API to reflect viewer engagement in real time and create on-screen graphics that show poll results, analyze comments, or enable comment moderation.
There will soon be a lot more business transactions happening within Facebook Messenger if a recent discovery buried within the app is any indication.
According to Forbes, a “forthcoming software release” will let users pay for goods in person or “pay directly in Messenger when you pick up the item,” effectively turning Messenger into another Wallet service.
It sounds like rather than trying to compete with Apple Pay, Android Pay, and the like, Facebook will work to partner with such existing payment services, which could go a long way toward getting people to actually use it. If it works with services people are already using, people may be more inclined to try it out. On the other hand, it’s unclear what reason they would have to do so if they are in fact already using the other service.
As Forbes notes, however, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said a couple months ago that the company would be willing to partner with other companies that do payments.
Zuckerberg said during the company’s earnings conference call (via Seeking Alpha’s transcript), “On payments, the basic strategy that we have is to make it especially in products like Messenger that where the business interaction maybe a bit more transactional, to take all the friction out of making the transactions that you need. So, we don’t view ourselves as a payments business, that’s not the type of company that we are. We’ll partner with everyone who does payment. We look at the stuff that Apple is doing with Apple Pay for example as a really neat innovation in the space that takes a lot of friction out of transactions as well. And our view is that the less friction, the better the user experience, the more people can easily interact with businesses that they care about. And ultimately for our business that will drive up the amount that businesses are willing to pay to advertise to send people into those interactions because they perform well. So it’s good for everyone but that’s how we think about that.”
During the call, Zuckerberg said with Messenger, they had been focused on two things. The first was expanding the the types of content people can share with the service. The other thing would be business.
“But in terms of the business, the more important piece is how people can interact with businesses through Messenger,” he said. “And we started some early small tests around f8 last year where with some ecommerce services made it so that people who were buying things could follow up with the business and get customer support and buy more things. And we went through this process of integrating that and making sure that it’s integrated with all these system well. And I think everyone is really happy with that so far. So we started off pretty slowly, but that’s going to be some of the basis for how we look to make Messenger a business going forward. And we’re happy with the initial results. There is obviously a lot more there that we need to do and we’ll have more to talk about this year and beyond.”
It was about a year ago that Facebook began allowing for P2P payments with Messenger.
As Zuckerberg alluded to, Facebook introduced some things at F8 last year. For one, they turned Messenger into a platform, and opened it to developers to build new experiences. Secondly, they revealed business features like the ability to let your customers connect with you via Messenger and then send them personalized updates and talk to them in real time.
In August, Facebook launched Pages Messaging, which gave customers more ways to send messages to businesses and ways for Page admins to manage and respond to them. People can send messages to Page from a local awareness ad. They’ll see a button that says “Send Message” from which they can initiate a onversation in a Messenger window that appears. For Pages, the incoming messages include an attachment that shows the ad that prompted the message. Once the user initiates the conversation, the business can respond as they like. They also started letting businesses respond via FB message to public comments.
Late last year, Facebook announced its Request a Ride service, which let users request, track, and pay for Uber rides all within Messenger. Messenger got new Lyft integration earlier this month as well. Now, you can also check into KLM flights with Messenger.
A December report found that Messenger is the fastest growing of the top apps in the U.S. It has 800 million people using it each month. Earlier this year, Facebook shared this infographic looking at last year’s additions to the product as well as trends for this year.
F8 is coming back on April 12, and the company is expected to make new announcements pertaining to Messenger’s progress and plans for business. This may very well include new payment partners.
Do you expect Messenger to be a valuable tool for business?
Zuckerberg reportedly jumped into the top ten of Forbes Billionaires List for 2016 from No. 16 to No. 6 spot for the very first time. The young billionaire has a net worth of $44.6 billion and according to Forbes, he had one of the most fruitful financial years of his life in 2015. Despite economic problems faced by many entrepreneurs last year, Mark Zuckerberg was able to rake in $11.2 billion.
The 31-year-old Zuckerberg is also the youngest of the top 10 billionaires by 21 years. The second-youngest is Jeff Bezos, the 52-year-old founder of Amazon. Bezos secured the number 5 spot with his net worth of $48.9 billion. Like Zuckerberg, this is also his first time to land in the top ten.
Microsoft owner Bill Gates remains the richest man as he maintained his number one ranking for the last three years, with a net worth of $75 billion. He is followed by Amancio Ortega of Zara with $68.2 billion, Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway on the third spot with $63.4 billion, and Carlos Slim, head of telecom company América Móvil, securing the fourth place on the top ten list with $53.2 billion.
If Mark Zuckerberg continues to earn 11 billion in the coming years, he could edge out Gates soon.
Forbes included 1,810 of the world’s richest people this year and their total net worth is $6.84 trillion. It is revealed that the U.S has the most number of billionaires with 540 billionaires, followed by mainland China with 251. The U.S. also has the most women in the 2016 list with 65 female billionaires followed by Germany with 27.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a few sharp words for some of his employees after discovering that they have been crossing out “Black Lives Matter” on the doodle boards of the Menlo Park headquarters and replacing them with “All Lives Matter.”
Tech blog Gizmodo was able to acquire an internal memo penned by Zuckerberg and posted on a company-wide announcement page. In the memo, the 31-year-old mogul admonished staff members for defacing the slogans and described the acts as “malicious” and unacceptable. He also reminded them that he had already given prior warning during a Q&A session held the previous week.
Facebook is known to encourage its more than 12,000 employees to write freely and express themselves on the huge chalkboards, dry-erase boards, and walls found around the main office, emulating the virtual “wall” that the social media giant has made so popular.
However, Mark Zuckerberg emphasized the importance of respecting each other’s views and opinions.
“We’ve never had rules around what people can write on our walls,” stated Zuckerberg in the post. “We expect everybody to treat each other with respect.”
“I was already very disappointed by this disrespectful behavior before, but after my communication I now consider this malicious as well,” he added.
Mark Zuckerberg may seem adamant in fostering an atmosphere of diversity and equality within his company, but statistics show that only about 2% of Facebook’s workforce consists of African Americans. Other well-known companies in Silicon Valley are not that different, and the progress in hiring more non-white employees has been quite slow.
“Black Lives Matter” actually started out as a hashtag on Facebook in 2013 following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a white/hispanic man who gunned down an unarmed black teen named Trayvon Martin.
Facebook is currently investigating the defacement incident and is also scheduled to hold a 30-minute town hall on March 4th. Mark Zuckerberg invited his employees to attend the meeting, which aims to educate and enlighten them regarding the Black Lives Matter movement.
![Facebook Opens Live API To Let Developers Build Ability To Stream to FB Live From Any Device [F8]](https://dev.webpronews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/f8-zuckerberg-100x53.png)
