<story><title>Internal emails cause more trouble for Facebook and its C.E.O.</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/facebooks-very-bad-month-just-got-worse</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>martinald</author><text>Agreed - though at least in my contacts in the UK, everyone uses WhatsApp (and whatsapp groups) instead of FB. People used to make a FB event for a party now make a WhatsApp group which everyone gets invited into.&lt;p&gt;I think what Facebook is very very good at is tracking the market and identifying potential competitors and buying them up.&lt;p&gt;My previous thoughts (and still are) was that FB would become a media holding company, similar to Comcast or Fox&amp;#x2F;News Corp.&lt;p&gt;The problems I now see for them is they are really starting to piss off regulators, who will probably not look kindly to future acquisitions, especially larger ones.&lt;p&gt;They also have a problem that WhatsApp is IMO cannibalising their core &amp;#x27;social media&amp;#x27; offerings and I can&amp;#x27;t see how they can commercialise that product without eroding the privacy and&amp;#x2F;or simplicity aspects which make it so popular.&lt;p&gt;In hindsight I think Apple locking iMessage to iPhone was a mistake. If they&amp;#x27;d released an Android version Apple would have surpassed WhatsApp in non-US markets where iPhone penetration is lower, and would have dominated the messaging space like it does in the US, as they&amp;#x27;d be preinstalled on every iPhone to seed the market.</text></item><item><author>eksemplar</author><text>I wonder when Facebook is going to get disrupted. It seems to me their key feature is having everyone connected, and while anecdotal, my friends list sure hasn’t been affected by these scandals.&lt;p&gt;What has been affected is the perception. It’s no longer considered cool to have a Facebook account. Meet-ups and interest groups are still heavily used in my social circles, but it’s almost always with an apology for being on Facebook.&lt;p&gt;Instagram has suffered less, but instagram isn’t really useful for anything but wasting time.&lt;p&gt;Facebook on the other hand serves as a modern day yellowpages and meetup combined, but with its popularity dropping and people slowly adopting privacy concerns, it seems like the right company with the right business model could displace Facebook.&lt;p&gt;Of course you could say something similar about google and how it’s search engine is so terrible at finding anything interesting.&lt;p&gt;Maybe it’s my little anecdotal world playing tricks on my perception, but to me, the whole web seems ripe for another revolution.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>samat</author><text>iMessage (and more importantly, FaceTime) is the single most important reason why I buy apple devices for my whole extended family, so that we can communicate without ads, with privacy and with proper security in place.&lt;p&gt;So that&amp;#x27;s pretty decent market strategy on Apple&amp;#x27;s end, i&amp;#x27;d say.</text></comment>
<story><title>Internal emails cause more trouble for Facebook and its C.E.O.</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/facebooks-very-bad-month-just-got-worse</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>martinald</author><text>Agreed - though at least in my contacts in the UK, everyone uses WhatsApp (and whatsapp groups) instead of FB. People used to make a FB event for a party now make a WhatsApp group which everyone gets invited into.&lt;p&gt;I think what Facebook is very very good at is tracking the market and identifying potential competitors and buying them up.&lt;p&gt;My previous thoughts (and still are) was that FB would become a media holding company, similar to Comcast or Fox&amp;#x2F;News Corp.&lt;p&gt;The problems I now see for them is they are really starting to piss off regulators, who will probably not look kindly to future acquisitions, especially larger ones.&lt;p&gt;They also have a problem that WhatsApp is IMO cannibalising their core &amp;#x27;social media&amp;#x27; offerings and I can&amp;#x27;t see how they can commercialise that product without eroding the privacy and&amp;#x2F;or simplicity aspects which make it so popular.&lt;p&gt;In hindsight I think Apple locking iMessage to iPhone was a mistake. If they&amp;#x27;d released an Android version Apple would have surpassed WhatsApp in non-US markets where iPhone penetration is lower, and would have dominated the messaging space like it does in the US, as they&amp;#x27;d be preinstalled on every iPhone to seed the market.</text></item><item><author>eksemplar</author><text>I wonder when Facebook is going to get disrupted. It seems to me their key feature is having everyone connected, and while anecdotal, my friends list sure hasn’t been affected by these scandals.&lt;p&gt;What has been affected is the perception. It’s no longer considered cool to have a Facebook account. Meet-ups and interest groups are still heavily used in my social circles, but it’s almost always with an apology for being on Facebook.&lt;p&gt;Instagram has suffered less, but instagram isn’t really useful for anything but wasting time.&lt;p&gt;Facebook on the other hand serves as a modern day yellowpages and meetup combined, but with its popularity dropping and people slowly adopting privacy concerns, it seems like the right company with the right business model could displace Facebook.&lt;p&gt;Of course you could say something similar about google and how it’s search engine is so terrible at finding anything interesting.&lt;p&gt;Maybe it’s my little anecdotal world playing tricks on my perception, but to me, the whole web seems ripe for another revolution.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gaius</author><text>&lt;i&gt;think what Facebook is very very good at is tracking the market and identifying potential competitors&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Well, they did that with Onavo didn’t they? Snooping VPN traffic to see who else their users were using. It remains to be seen if they can be as astute without that backdoor.</text></comment>