[ad_1]
In a strange twist of events, Facebook announced a $ 16.9 billion business figure Wednesday, exceeding expectations the same day, Apple has expelled one of its applications from the App Store for violation of rights of the user. Revenue has even increased in the United States and Canada, where Facebook has generated more than $ 8 billion, despite relatively stable usage in North America.
While Facebook's chief financial officer, David Wehner, warned that growth would slow down this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said product creation would increase, including through messaging applications, and the creation of new user experiences is at the heart of Facebook's mission for the coming year.
"Messaging is the fastest growing field and this year, users will feel that these applications will become the center of their social experience in different ways. We will make payments on WhatsApp in other countries. Private sharing in groups and stories will become more central in the experience. We will be shipping millions of other businesses that people can interact with, "Zuckerberg said in a Facebook message.
Regardless of Facebook's plans for its app family, the company needs to do more than just add payments or bring more advertise the fast growing feature of Stories taken by Snapchat. With all the AI and social intelligence at its disposal – and an endless stream of controversies – Facebook would do better to make its next products a little weird.
By odd, I do not mean by facial recognition or new features that exacerbate the fears of privacy advocates; I want to say something that takes advantage of Facebook's social network data around groups, News Feed, perhaps even its new dating service to rekindle people's enthusiasm for the good that online connection can bring. social.
The odd value has recently been hailed by the chief scientist of the Facebook IA research, Yann LeCun. In response to a tweet from Julian Togelius, director of Game University in New York, about how small AI companies can compete with big tech giants, LeCun simply tweeted "Be weird".
Be strange. https://t.co/UKyrITEdJi
– Yann LeCun (@ylecun) January 26, 2019
But the fact is that we know very little about the appearance of new Facebook products.
What we do know is that any new offer will probably include end-to-end encryption, which is not a bad decision for a company that is struggling to regain public trust.
As we learned last week, in the coming years Facebook will be creating a common messaging infrastructure on Instagram, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, which will introduce encryption to two of the most widely used messaging services on the planet (WhatsApp is already end-to-end). encrypted) and facilitates the sending of messages between them.
Another obvious result of this unification could be the addition of Instagram and the WhatsApp call feature to Portal, the first internally-developed Facebook consumer product that became available last fall. Currently, Portal and Portal + only issue Messenger calls, but such an initiative would easily extend calls to more than a billion people and further reduce friction between the most popular applications. business.
A unique social experience, paired with three of the world's most widely used messaging apps, could also allow Facebook to better engage with home users, allowing it to offer something that is not needed. not available with screens and smart speakers from Amazon and Google.
One way to flip through stories on a portal device might be weird.
A universe of third-party AR experiences to use during Portal calls and applications that you can use when you are not making calls can be very strange.
It may be that strange things from the many articles generated by Facebook AI Research can be interesting, like giving people a personal badistant who learns more about you over time, a tourist bot or an RV robot. conversational business that can respond on your behalf.
Zuckerberg even alluded to this in a Facebook article he read at the beginning of the financial results call, saying the company "would need new experiences to significantly improve people's lives."
"I'm not talking about the many iterative daily improvements we're making for the rankings to improve a bit or things to improve a bit, but major improvements in people's lives that entire communities are recognizing. and say, "Wow, we're all doing something new on Facebook or WhatsApp that we did not do before," he said.
Over the past year, we've been informed of Facebook's involvement in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a co-founder of WhatsApp said you should delete Facebook, saw Instagram's co-founders leave the company and witnessed violations repeated data affecting tens of millions of people.
Monday, Facebook is 15 years old. We are so far from the time when the platform was better badociated with students or an internal hacker culture.
In the last generation, Facebook has managed to create a global monopoly and gain more knowledge about the global social graph than any other company. What will follow should show Facebook's knowledge of human connection, and not just make incremental improvements to its many recommendation engines.
In the future, society should find a way to create products that do not simply create more confidence or sell ads, but that ignite people's imagination. This will not leave society aside for its role in inciting genocide, for facilitating meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, for the alleged mistreatment of employees and for of black users, or for its bottomless ambition manifestations.
But that could help Zuckerberg reach his goal of giving users a memorable experience – and perhaps bringing us something special that only Facebook can offer.
[ad_2]
Source link
