Research archive for META

Facebook (Fays-book). According to the Dictionary of Naryshkine, "to Facebook" is a verb whereby you will completely ignore the people around you in order to post comments or statuses for maximum likes, mostly to people who are "friends", not necessarily your closest 10 besties. These "interactions" can take place in traffic, either driving or walking (both dangerous), at social gatherings when you are supposed to be talking to physical people, somehow the virtual people always seem more interesting. Weirdly, as online dictionaries point out, the word Facebook is often written with an upper case, yet the trademark name is in lower case, facebook.

Facebook reported numbers post the market close last evening, this was for their third quarter to end September. Highlights include crossing the billion daily active user mark for the first time ever, a 17 percent increase over this time last year, of which 894 million are on their mobile phones (27 percent increase year-over-year), monthly active users are 1.545 billion (1.385 billion on their mobiles, 1 billion on Android phones). And you and I can remember a time when the chattering classes were worried about Facebook being able to monetise mobile, remember that and the "disastrous listing"? Quarterly revenues grew to 4.5 billion Dollars, a record quarter for the company, the lions share of that (4.299 billion Dollars) being advertising. Revenues across all of their geographies grew strongly, when measured against the comparative quarter, take a look at this slide from their presentation:

Facebook. Something your parents did not have, heck they had no idea what a personal computer was, that was something that you only saw around the late eighties. My dad got a Commodore 64, that was the first time that I ever saw something that awesome. It did not capture me straight away, it took a while. I can't even say that I was quick on the draw with Facebook, Twitter I was a little early, Instagram I was way early. WhatsApp, I am getting better at that.

Facebook reported numbers post the market last evening. Facebook, contrary to the chattering classes and naysayers, has turned out to be a solid business run by a fellow that has some serious skills. I think that Mark Zuckerberg is in a league with the business greats, obviously there is a lot of work to do. I get that he wants everyone to have access to the internet, I sometimes think that if I could give the Nobel peace prize to a thing, it would be the internet. Who would get the money, Al Gore? Ha ha, kidding, perhaps it can be donated to Wikipedia. Did you know that Zuckerberg's middle name is Elliot?

WhatsApp Y'all? A monster drive to 800 million users is what the company announced on Friday, although the information itself was not on the WhatsApp Blog, you would have thought that might have been a good place to announce it. The company is a little over six years old. In other words, if this were a little human (I have good recent experience with little people of this age), they would be in their first year of school. They would recognise words and numbers, reading would come next year. Not on the Facebook platform ever, not via their investor relations pages. So where was the "official" release that WhatsApp had passed through that milestone? Via a Facebook post by co-founder of WhatsApp, Jan Koum. I took a screen grab of the post, for the simple reason of who liked it:

Facebook announced a new Instagram app last evening: Introducing Layout from Instagram. For those of you who use Facebook exclusively, Instagram is more about photos, images, letting the picture tell 1000 words. If you want to know how it works, follow the link to the Instagram blog: Introducing Layout from Instagram. Again, there is a link to a help section on the Instagram blog which enables you to see how to use the new app, you can use up to 9 photos and then post them all together, via Instagram. Whilst there are many applications that allow you to do this, this is specifically for integration with Instagram, to allow you to do something different.

Oh wow. We knew that this was coming, the logistics of it was not quite something that people could get their heads around. Facebook payments are going to be a reality between two parties using the Messenger option. Check it out: Send Money to Friends in Messenger. It seems really simple and of course, as we have been saying all along, the payments systems will be the traditional ones, you need a Visa or MasterCard debit card.

Facebook. Most people, even your grandmother, has heard of it. Do you not want to be friends with your grandmother on Facebook, what is that all about? The service works seamlessly in the background whilst many users of what has become a transformative and useful service are not too aware of the company dynamics. I mean that from a profitability point of view. Sure, you know that Mark Zuckerberg is crazy rich and just around 30 years old, you know his wife is Priscilla, they live in a fairly modest suburb considering his personal wealth. His dog, Beast, has many more likes (2,127,338 when I checked this morning) than your business or organisation is likely to have. Beast last posted on the first of January, before that in September, when it was bath time. The truth is, and Facebook confirms this, people are interested in people and their goings on, the conversation does not have to be Philosophy 301.

Did you see Mark Zuckerberg in an interview at Beijing's Tsinghua University? If not, here it is, a condensed first part of the interview: Watch Mark Zuckerberg Speak Mandarin. I love the crowd reaction, I have read that his mandarin is not great, he seems to be understood and it is far better than most of the languages that I can speak! As he points out, his wife and her family are Chinese, so he needed to communicate with all of them, hence the need to learn the language.

A short note on the Whatsapp milestones, whilst we are talking about such events and progress, Jan Koum, the Whatsapp founder sent his 55th tweet last evening:

Facebook reported numbers post the market close last evening. Once your base grows bigger and bigger it becomes a mathematical impossibility to grow at the same rate. Firstly, most of the users have adopted Facebook already that were keen to do so and secondly your potential user group gets smaller. I guess one could argue that if every human with a reliable internet connection had a Facebook account, the company could have a whole lot more than 1.32 billion users. Roughly 63 percent of that base use Facebook daily. Monthly active user growth is around 3.5 percent, which I think is astonishing, others are not wowed. 40 million users were added in the last quarter and now one in five people around the world log into their Facebook accounts on a monthly basis. Differently put 4 in 5 do not have a Facebook account.

Last night we received highly anticipated results from Facebook. It's ironic that Apple results and Facebook results are released on the same day because the efficiency of the Apple products have made the Facebook mobile experience just that much better. Conversely people want fancy phones so they can access and enjoy their Facebook. Both companies compliment each other well.

Crazy. This is amazing, WhatsApp zooms to record 64 billion messages in one day. But what was quite amazing is that this announcement came on .... Twitter. Reminder. Facebook bought WhatsApp for 19 billion Dollars. Twitter is worth 27 billion Dollars. So, WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, sends record number of messages and then announces it on Twitter. Got it.

Everyone knows about Facebook, it is an extremely visible company for obvious reasons. When they do stuff like buy Whatsapp for $19bn it becomes the latest talking point around the dinner table. If GE were doing such a large acquisition it would draw half the interest. When these acquisitions are discussed the biggest talking point is why Facebook would buy such a company and how would they integrate it with their current business model. People um and ah, trying to justify the acquisition.

What the hell? Who? What? Actually someone had told me a small while back that this was the next big thing, and that it was likely to crush console's as we know them. Your PS3 is so out of date that it might as well be R2-D2 or C-3PO. OK, that is nasty, your PS3 is still as awesome as Schalk Burger. Who IS REALLY awesome! What am I talking about here? Rambling on. Well, it is Facebook and a purchase that probably came from left field. Deep square leg, or make that deep extra cover. Oculus VR is the object of Facebook's attention, and the price range is a whopping 2 billion Dollars. There is a private investor who sits on both boards, and coincidentally Instagram too - Marc Andreessen is his name, he DID NOT participate in the negotiations. Palmer Luckey founded this business in 2012. And Palmer is all of 21 years old. That is it chaps. What were you doing when you were 21? Were you selling a business to Facebook for 2 billion Dollars? No, sadly we were not.