Why WhatsApp matters – The New York Times

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WhatsApp is being renovated before our eyes. Watch what happens, because even if you don’t use the messaging app, the changes could reshape the direction of the internet.

Never before has an online property been so popular and made so little money. More than two billion people around the world regularly use WhatsApp to text or make phone calls, but this hardly generates any money for Facebook, which has owned WhatsApp since 2014.

This is because WhatsApp is mainly a personal communication app and Facebook doesn’t make any money from this group chat with your cousins. It looks like it’s about to change. Haltingly, including agreeing to buy a customer service startup on Monday, Facebook is trying to use its branded playbook to remake WhatsApp into a go-to way for businesses to interact with us.

If Facebook understands it, WhatsApp could change the way we shop and use the internet forever – as the company’s main social network and Instagram have done. Otherwise, Facebook will own a spectacularly popular failure. The outcome will set the trends in our digital life and determine which businesses do and which do not.

To understand WhatsApp, you need to know about Facebook three step playbook and why it is down.

First of all, Facebook creates a nice space for people to spend time together. It was the original Facebook social network, then he bought spots like Instagram and WhatsApp.

Once a lot of people are there and comfortable, Facebook allows businesses to mingle with people and maybe try to sell running shoes or linens. Step three, the company finds ways to charge these companies to reach people. This is the ticket to wealth.

With its main social network and Instagram, businesses pay Facebook by buying ads. Facebook’s other messaging app, Messenger, has also started down this path. But Facebook has decided that ads are probably not the way to go for WhatsApp. And he’s not sure what else to do when he has to deviate from his three-step plan.

The first two steps went wonderfully with WhatsApp. The app is not widely used in the United States, but in many countries it is the perfect way to keep in touch with your friends and family. And businesses use WhatsApp to take product orders or answer customer questions.

It’s just that Facebook hasn’t quite figured out how to refine these habits, refine them, spread them to more businesses, and make money from them. This third step is delicate. It’s heartwarming, really, to see the big and mighty Facebook fumbling around in the dark a bit.

With the planned purchase of Kustomer, a (ridiculously named) startup that helps businesses provide customer service through chat apps, you can see that Facebook wants WhatsApp to be a version of customer call centers. He’s also trying to make WhatsApp a 21st century Sears catalog, or maybe a digital currency.

It all sounds plausible. Of course, WhatsApp could be the best forum for airlines to book your flights and for you to browse Levi’s jeans and buy a pair in the chat app. WhatsApp might be the only online presence for many businesses. Or maybe none of this will be widely disseminated. I don’t know, and maybe for the first time in its history, Facebook doesn’t know either.

The direction of WhatsApp is important because it concerns us.

Think about how Facebook and Instagram have changed the number of us interacting with each other and finding information, influenced the way companies care about their products, and perhaps rewired our brains.

WhatsApp is again, but potentially deeper as the app is most popular in countries where internet habits are relatively new. WhatsApp in India could change the entire retail industry in ways we can’t imagine. This could influence the way governments plan their currencies.

Or, again, WhatsApp could remain very popular but never meet Facebook’s hopes. I don’t know what outcome we want, but I’ll be very careful in both cases.

One of the big criticisms of the tech industry is that it focuses on trivial things.

Peter Thiel, a leading investor in tech startups, summed up this criticism by saying, “We wanted flying cars; instead, we have 140 characters. (This was a reference to the old length of tweets. Now they can be up to 280 characters long.)

But what if there are deep results from the technology and we just don’t see or understand them?

My colleague Cade Metz wrote about a computer system that can identify the precise shape of tiny proteins in the human body in minutes or hours, instead of years or decades. The breakthrough, Cade wrote, “could accelerate the ability to understand disease, develop new drugs and unravel mysteries in the human body.

It’s a technology most of us will never see or think about, but could save lives. And there are other examples of technologies that are hardly trivial but underestimated by many of us.

Smartphones couldn’t exist without increasingly sophisticated computer chip designs and factories to make them. I love telling you about boring technologies like buildings filled with bloated computers and metal poles in the ground that have dramatically expanded internet access around the world.

I’ve been struck this year both by the limits of technology and by our sometimes inability to appreciate the impact of technology if it doesn’t look us in the face (or fly over our heads).

Yes, I want technology that can solve the world’s toughest problems in transport, housing, healthcare and climate change. But we also have to recognize that technology doesn’t have to be as obvious or glamorous as flying cars to change the world.

  • Nothing makes sense: America is in the midst of a pandemic and millions of people are struggling. You wouldn’t know from a new record price for Bitcoin cryptocurrency, or Airbnb’s plan to become a richer company than nearly any US hotel chain.

  • Work harder but earn less: Driving for Uber was a way for some people in Kenya to make a good living. But when the company cut fares, introduced new car classes and added more drivers, it ruined some of the Kenyans who had borrowed money to drive for the service, NBC News and the Pulitzer Center reported.

  • Five models in conspiracy theories: The Guardian writes about the rhetorical devices common to many plots, and the best ways to respond to them. One example: a mistake of claiming “some sort of causal link from a random coincidence” including the arrival of 5G cellular technology around the same time as the coronavirus.

In the 1970s, an Italian singer recorded a song with absurd lyrics meant to sound like English. It is so strange and incredibly captivating.

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