Facebook forever: assimilating every great mobile experience

This post is part of the Facebook forever series, on Facebook’s plan to outlast the web on mobile.

Until as recently as last year, Mark Zuckerberg thought of Facebook as a web company. Now, he says, mobile is the company’s “big focus” moving forward. In this series, we’ll examine Facebook’s strategic positioning to become a conglomeration of great mobile experiences, offer a wealth of features to displace competitors, and build a next-generation mobile platform designed to replace the web.

In 2008, Facebook released the first version of their iOS app to coincide with the launch of the App Store. The app’s interface was built to match the glossy buttons of iOS (then called iPhone OS) 2.0, but featured clunky web views of the News Feed and spotty performance issues as a result. Facebook has reinvented their flagship app some half-dozen times in the years since then, but recently the company has begun concentrating their efforts on a new mobile strategy: conglomeration.

While Facebook’s unmatched army of users may love their web interface and mobile apps today, the company isn’t banking on their loyalty forever. To ensure its survival for the next decade, Facebook has begun making strategic acquisitions that will position the company for long-term usership and relevance — if not as Facebook the product, then as Facebook the company.

Facebook the product may not last forever. But Facebook the company just might.

Some of these additions have seemed likely to conflict with Facebook’s existing offerings, but that may be exactly the idea. In 2012, Facebook acquired budding photo sharing network Instagram for $1 billion, a deal that was questioned by pundits but seems like a bargain in hindsight. Some of the confusion stemmed from the fact that Facebook already offered a Photos product, which included comments and likes much like Instagram’s. They had even developed a Camera app that featured filters and effects matching many of those found in Instagram. Their existing services even included tagging and geolocations, two features that didn’t come to Instagram until later.

But the overlap didn’t matter. Rather than investing in its existing products in order to compete, Facebook chose to control another mobile experience that engaged users in new ways. And with new development and infrastructure resources from Facebook at their disposal, Instagram has grown into a mobile giant with 200 million active users. By diversifying their app offerings and building a brand that included neither the words “face” nor “book,” the company grew a new audience of users who may never have an interest in Facebook’s flagship app.

Facebook has since used Instagram as the proving ground for a few new photo messaging initiatives. Since the rise in Snapchat’s popularity and the failure of the company’s Poke competitor, Facebook has used Instagram as the outlet for two new services, Instagram Direct and their recently-leaked Bolt. These messengers hope to leverage Instagram’s incredible popularity to deliver Facebook the Snapchat rival they apparently crave, and feature no explicit relationship to Facebook itself. In theory, future users of Instagram’s Bolt might have no idea that the mobile experience was developed by the same company responsible for Poke and Slingshot — and that’s precisely how Facebook wants it.

A more significant example is Facebook’s highly publicized purchase of WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2013. Facebook purchased the mobile messaging service despite its complete feature overlap with Messenger, and has continued to operate the app and community separate from the rest of Facebook. While it’s conceivably possible that Facebook could have merged WhatsApp with Messenger, growing its user base by more than 200 million, the company seems contented with allowing the service to carry on unaltered. This is perhaps because WhatsApp is targeted at a different market than Messenger, with clients available for platforms like BlackBerry and Symbian, and attracts international interest for its affordability versus traditional SMS messaging.

Interestingly, Facebook has maintained the brand identity of its major acquisitions to date, unlike rivals like Google who appear keen to streamline their offerings with the Google name and suffixal logo treatment. Each of these acquired products services a distinct audience and addresses a unique need, meaning that they can exist in parallel with other Facebook apps on many consumers’ phones. This is at the heart of Facebook’s mobile strategy: it doesn’t matter how you choose to do what you do with your smartphone, as long as you’re using a Facebook property to do it. Or, more specifically, as long as the advertisements you see along the way are being delivered by Facebook.

It doesn’t matter how you choose to do what you do with your smartphone, as long as you’re using a Facebook property to do it.

As recent releases show, Facebook is interested in offering users multiple ways to engage with content on Facebook. News Feed client Paper allows iPhone users to read and share content through Facebook, but secondary features like Events, Groups, and even Timelines take a back seat. New business and brand-focused apps like Pages Manager and Mentions allow companies and marketers to leverage the Facebook platform to engage with users, but leave behind superfluous features targeted at average users.

These remixed versions of the full Facebook experience underscore the company’s commitment to allow mobile users to engage with the Facebook ecosystem in the way that makes sense for them. This extends the relevance and usefulness of content on Facebook and provides for selective participation, meaning users can engage with only those Facebook products they need. Someone can use Messenger and Instagram but never touch the flagship app, another can manage their business’s Page and chat on WhatsApp without ever interacting with Facebook friends. These choices guarantee that Facebook users will continue to have use for Facebook products when they’re uninterested in updating their status — even if that means they leave the little blue “F” off their home screen.

Facebook wants to have as large of a presence on your smartphone’s home screen as they possibly can, no matter who you are or what your interests may be. To that end, they’ve invested billions of dollars and the immense weight of the company’s mobile development resources to develop differentiated mobile experiences that, while they might not advertise the fact, are controlled by Facebook. Next, we’ll investigate how Facebook aims to grow their apps’ feature sets to address as many mobile use cases as possible — and replace any rival apps in the process.