This could be the beginning of the end for Facebook’s social network

Facebook’s future is personal messaging. That a great deal was clear from a put up CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared on Wednesday outlining the organization’s newly stated course. Intimate, encrypted, personal messaging offerings like WhatsApp and Messenger are in. Facebook’s semi-public, not-very-private News Feed is out.

“I agree with the destiny of conversation will more and more shift to private, encrypted services in which people can be assured what they say to each different remains at ease and their messages and content material received’t stick around forever,” Zuckerberg wrote. “This is the future I hope we can help result in.”

The summit turned into significant for a number of motives, perhaps most significantly because Facebook has constructed a $55 billion annual advertising business on merchandise that isn’t without a doubt personal, don’t have to give up-to-quit encryption, and do stick around for all time. (Or quite darn close.)

This is, on the floor, a dramatic shift in Facebook’s questioning. And it leads to a number of questions.

Why is Facebook doing this?

Zuckerberg solutions that query without explicitly answering that query. “In a few years,” he wrote, “I assume future versions of Messenger and WhatsApp to turn out to be the primary methods humans speak at the Facebook community.” It’s as easy as that. Facebook doesn’t make product selections without consulting user data. And if Zuckerberg says he expects that WhatsApp and Messenger are the destiny, it’s because that’s where Facebook sees that customers are already spending their time.

Facebook foreshadowed this statement ultimate fall whilst it instructed buyers that Stories, the ephemeral photo and video montages it copied from Snapchat, was blowing up in phrases of popularity. “I simply think that this is the destiny,” Zuckerberg said at the time. “People want to proportion in methods that don’t stick around permanently, and I want to be sure that we completely embody this.”

Facebook can see what its customers are doing — they’re sending private messages and sharing disappearing photos and videos — and it’s leaning into the one’s traits.

What will appear to Facebook and Instagram?

Nothing but. Zuckerberg didn’t say whatever about abandoning Facebook or Instagram, and it appears as Instagram will finally get greater privateness and encryption functions that match with Facebook’s new project. The reality is that Zuckerberg couldn’t abandon those products even supposing he wanted to: The enormous majority of Facebook’s revenue comes from those apps, so they won’t be going everywhere.

What this does seem to signal, although, is something alternatively startling: This feels just like the beginning of the give up of Facebook’s core social community. No, Facebook isn’t going away each time quickly. Yes, Facebook may additionally nonetheless be relevant a decade from now. And it’s likely the company will maintain to invest in building Facebook functions, like Marketplace and Facebook Watch.

But Facebook’s center social community is in most cases a place to publish images and videos and remarks that aren’t non-public and don’t disappear. That’s not the future Facebook is building in the direction of — and reputedly no longer the destiny that users in real need. What that honest manner on your News Feed is unclear, although it’s not possible to change every time quickly.

Will this impact Facebook’s commercial enterprise?

This may be the most critical question, and it’s one Zuckerberg didn’t cope with in his post. But Facebook’s entire commercial enterprise is built on a statistics-pushed advertising and marketing model. Facebook places ads into users’ feeds, and messaging apps don’t have the ones feeds. Those ads also are precious to advertisers because Facebook can goal human beings based on statistics that they hold on their profile. If every person is the use of private messaging apps with excessive stages of encryption, it’s truthful to surprise what statistics Facebook will use to target people with ads transferring forward.

That doesn’t imply there is no enterprise model for personal messaging — WhatsApp and Messenger have Stories, as an instance, and Facebook can sell ads alongside those Stories. WhatsApp is also building out a commercial enterprise product, in an effort to let manufacturers and shops communicate with users via messages. Given Facebook’s interest in cryptocurrencies, it seems that there can be an possibility for the company to push deeper into commerce and payments as matters grow to be more and more non-public and comfortable.

But WhatsApp and Messenger aren’t big corporations for Facebook in spite of having more than 1 billion customers apiece. Figuring out a way to make cash from messaging can be important to this manner. It appears Facebook has time. The employer’s stock slightly moved at the information Wednesday, which means it’s clean investors aren’t concerned, at least in the short time period.

Are there dangers to having everything encrypted?

Yes, there are definite tradeoffs. Messages which are stop-to-end encrypted aren’t handy by means of Facebook, that’s high-quality news for privacy, but also make it less difficult for horrific actors to apply Facebook merchandise to do damage. WhatsApp is already managing this in India, in which so-referred to as fake news has been an actual hassle, in a few instances leading to actual offline violence. In Brazil, a WhatsApp government changed into arrested a few years ago due to the fact the authorities wanted access to some user messages, which Facebook claims it couldn’t offer. Zuckerberg stated that during Facebook’s non-public, encrypted future, the enterprise will now not be capable of seizing posts on “infant exploitation, terrorism, and extortion,” but that it nonetheless has “a duty to paintings with law enforcement and to help prevent those anyplace we can.”

There are blessings to encryption, too. Most human beings might possibly say they don’t want Facebook (or Apple or Google) having access to their non-public messages. And as Zuckerberg pointed out, this could additionally be crucial as messaging apps become a place for economic transactions.

Ultimately, though, Zuckerberg says the charge-offs are well worth it. “We recognize there are a number of alternate-offs to get proper, and we’re dedicated to consulting with specialists and discussing the great manner forward,” he wrote.

Is this why Facebook wants to merge all of its messaging apps?

It’s a large part of it, yes. If people are flocking toward private messaging, it behooves Facebook to combine its services so that’s it’s less difficult to create one large network. Zuckerberg stated as much on Wednesday.

“Today if you need to message human beings on Facebook you have to use Messenger, on Instagram you have to use Direct, and on WhatsApp, you have to use WhatsApp,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We want to offer human beings a desire if you want to attain their buddies across those networks from whichever app they decide upon.”

Eventually, Zuckerberg needs this to “extend” to textual content messages as properly.

It’s also feasible Facebook is doing this to keep away from anti-agree with problems. There has been a number of communicating inside the beyond 12 months that Facebook is just too big, and might want to be broken up. That would be lots tougher to do if all its apps and services are related.

How speedy will all this happen?

It’s going to take some time for Facebook to reorient its merchandise to sense more personal. Zuckerberg said this transition could happen “over the next few years.” It’s under no circumstances uncommon for Facebook to announce things that by no means come to fruition, but this feels a touch too big to simply fall by way of the wayside.

One component to keep in mind: Facebook can’t merge all of its individual messaging apps until, at a minimum, they’re all stop-to-cease encrypted. That may be a lengthy process; it took WhatsApp years to completely roll it out. It won’t take that long this time around, and one supply interior Facebook said the purpose is to make some substantial movements in this merging procedure all through the second 1/2 of 2019. But this complete transition to greater encryption and extra privacy received’t be done each time soon.