Facebook wants to be Wechat
Is the world’s largest social network moving away from its news feed into an ecosystem that may look like China’s super app?
If you want a good idea of what Facebook seems to be pivoting itself to become, start using that everything app, Wechat. We tend to think of it as a Whatsapp alternative, but the Tencent wonder service is far more than that, especially in China. From messaging to booking and paying for restaurants, Wechat lets you send money to friends, pay vending machines, make calls, access services, even search for library books.
Wechat has 1.1-billion monthly users, according to Statista, making it the world’s fifth-largest social network behind Facebook (2.2bn), Youtube (1.9bn), Whatsapp (1.5bn) and Facebook Messenger (1.3bn). Instagram is sixth with 1bn users and Tencent’s other instant messaging service, QQ, is eighth with 803m. Launched in 2011, Weixin as it is known in China, was rebranded as Wechat for global audiences in 2012 and is partly why Tencent (of which Naspers owns a third) has become a powerhouse.
It’s thought Beijing is able to monitor Wechat, which sounds rather like Facebook’s surveillance capitalism. When Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook is to “pivot” to “privacy”, focus on its messaging apps and allow their users to communicate with each other, it set off alarm bells for privacy activists and antitrust authorities.
Another significant event took place last week when Zuck announced that his chief product officer Chris Cox (who some saw as the next CEO) was leaving.
Cox, a trusted lieutenant, oversaw the growth of the news feed into its most important feature around which user interaction and the world’s greatest advertising platform has been built. Casey Newton, Silicon Valley editor of The Verge, wrote: “When the history of Facebook is written, mark down March 14 2019 as the end of the news feed era … with Cox’s departure, its days as the central organising principle of Facebook are ... behind it.”
The writing is on the wall for Facebook’s old business model, especially after reports of a criminal case pending against it over privacy breaches.
So, what will the Facebook of the future look like? Very much like Wechat, many analysts are assuming. Arguably what made Wechat the giant it is, is the Chinese custom of giving red envelopes full of money as gifts for special occasions. The digital version of these red envelopes is credited with using Wechat for transactions as one of its dominant features.
Facebook is reportedly working on a cryptocurrency of its own (as are messaging apps Telegram and Signal). Trapped inside the messaging megalith, people will transact with services as is done inside Wechat. If Facebook is the walled-garden approach, Wechat is even more so but has succeeded in China because other players (Google, Youtube, Twitter and blogging platforms) aren’t available.
Facebook is expected to try to build a Wechat ecosystem inside its messaging apps and their new encryption. But it’s the same Facebook that sold your personal data to make money from advertising.