Mark Zuckerberg was in fine, jaunty form for last night's presentation about Facebook's new features. He looked more at ease and sounded more fluid than ever, rattling off an anecdote about a comment form a elderly neighbour who'd put in a request for video calling. Tick!
• Firstly - that main announcement of integrated Skype calling. The timing is absolutely right. Two of the biggest names in consumer web services, both mainstream enough to have major take up and at a time when consumers are finally beginning to overcome that inhibition about talking to their computers. Zuckerberg's anecdote about the elderly neighbour illustrated that, but I also know that when my Mum is talking about 'doing a Skype' that this really must have hit the mainstream.
Facebook demonstrates its new integrated Skype feature• Zuckerberg made a fairly crude attempt to deflect attention away from those possibly stalling growth numbers. Active monthly unique users is no longer the metric of choice at Facebook Towers, he would like us to believe. He declared that to be so, despite confirming that Facebook has now reached 750 million users - so that's 250m added in less than one year. No doubt when Facebook does finally reach that one billion target, active monthly users will become de rigueur again, but until then, Zuckerberg wants us to believe that the volume of shared pieces of content is a better representation of activity on Facebook. And that's 4bn every day, doubling from this time last year.
• Off the back of that explosion in sharing, Zuckerberg mentioned that to support growth, Facebook would be establishing more data centres after it opened its first in April this year. No more detail, but he said: "We're definitely on this trend now where it makes sense for us given the scale of usage and the information flowing through the network where we're probably going to be building our own data centers, rather than leasing."
• He made several subtle but interesting digs at Google, cleverly reinforcing his strategy of describing Facebook as the default social infrastructure of the web on which all other services will deploy their social elements. Default MySpace friend Tom Anderson wrote a good post, published on Google+, about Zuckerberg's comments on Google, but it is also worth noting that Zuckerberg described Google+ as just another company experimenting with social tools. With a touch of humility, Zuckerberg conceded that if Facebook doesn't keep innovating, it will be a different social infrastructure company that takes its place.
• On the press call after the presentation I asked what the roadmap for the development of this feature looks like, especially given how exciting Skype calls within Facebook's mobile apps could be.
"Our philosophy to is to build the best experiences for people on Facebook and we want lots of those experiences as soon as we are able to build them," said Peter Deng, Facebook's video call project manager.
"I was part of the original team that built Facebook Chat back in 2007 and over time we've added more features, observed how people are using the service, what they like and don't like, understand what is the right move to make…. it's more of an iterative process [than a planned roadmap] when we do product development. We're going to try to get next features out as quickly as possible, but understand how people use those products first.
"We don't have a timeline to announce right now, but we're working on improvements already."
Video calls on mobile through the Facebook app would be a direct rival to Apple's FaceTime (still think that's a dreadful name) but with a powerful social driver to initiate calls from within Facebook. That's what makes the video call so compelling from within Facebook though that said, I think many people might have the same reaction as me - to thoroughly review and clean up their Facebook contacts. Hovering over profile thumbnails and bringing up the 'video chat' option made me realise how few of these contacts I'd really what to talk to! If we haven't spoken since school, there's probably a reason for that. But that's for another day.
• From the analysts:
Ovum's Eden Zoller said Facebook/Skype is a blow to Google and Google+ Hangout. "We would expect the Facebook's video chat service to develop a strong mobile play given that at least half of Facebook's user base interact with the social network via mobile and also because Microsoft is determined to take Skype in this direction. A deepening Facebook, Microsoft and Skype alliance is on the cards and is a powerful prospect and one that will keep Google awake at night."
Frost & Sullivan's Jake Wengroff noted on Twitter that as only 6% of Skype users pay for services, the tie-up is unlikely to make anyone any cash. It's about strategic alliances. "I see it as a way for MSFT, Skype's new owner, to find a way to work with FB."
Colin Gills at BGC said it vindicated Microsoft's $8.5bn acquisition of Skype: "This deal helps explain the purchase price… Facebook is going to drive ubiquity for Skype."
No comments:
Post a Comment