When Evan Spiegel peered into a crystal ball to divine a future for his company, Snapchat, he did not see Facebook.
He saw something else, something much bigger — a social network that could exist on its own, outside Facebook.
Facebook is still the dominant social media service, and has been an
attractive suitor for many small start-ups. And Snapchat most likely
spurned Facebook partly because it thought it could fetch much more than
the billions Facebook was willing to pay.
But the snub also foreshadows a possible future where Facebook is no
longer the default place on the web where people go to network. The
swift rise of upstarts like Snapchat in a rapidly shifting social media
landscape suggests a changing reality for how — and where — people like
to spend their time.
The rebuff also reveals a changing perception of Facebook in the tech
industry. As the once scrappy start-up evolves into a sprawling
corporation, younger companies who view themselves as disruptive do not
find Facebook’s size and cushy campus as appealing. Not to mention that a
lot of them are trying to provide alternatives to Facebook, which means
selling to Facebook would defeat their entire purpose.
Despite the site’s primacy in the social media market, some numbers
suggest that Facebook addiction has given way to Facebook fatigue, at
least among some users. A study by the Pew Internet and American Life
Project found
that the majority of users have at one point or another taken a
multiweek break from the service, citing the tedium and irrelevancy of
its content. Among the crucial younger demographic — users ages 18 to 29
— that first propelled Facebook into prominence, 38 percent said they
expected to spend less time using the site this year.
The survey confirmed what some at the company already knew. In its
latest quarterly call with investors, Facebook said the youngest users
were spending less time on the service, although overall teenage
engagement was stable.
That fatigue may also have started to trickle down to the developers who build apps on top of Facebook’s platform.
The company’s business depends on the working relationships with those
developers. In its early years, Facebook carefully courted app
developers like game makers, including Zynga, for example. But it later
changed its rules to make it harder for apps to go viral. More recently,
though, it is trying to lure developers back with more favorable terms.
At an invitation-only mobile developers conference at Facebook on
Thursday, the day after reports emerged that Snapchat had rejected its
offer, Facebook product managers pushed mobile developers to incorporate
Graph Search, the company’s new social search feature, into their
products, which would help it spread its tendrils.
Facebook also pushed them to incorporate tools from Parse, a start-up it
acquired for a reported $85 million this year, which provides back-end
resources like analytics for mobile apps.
But some developers, who declined to be named because they work with
Facebook, said the pitch was unusually aggressive, especially compared
with a similar event for mobile developers at Google earlier in the
week, and made them less inclined to want to collaborate with Facebook.
For any company as large as Facebook, finding new sources of growth is a
challenge. Executives there have used acquisitions large and small to
help promote that growth. Being able to identify potential targets — and
acquire them quickly and affordably — is important for its continued
success.
Facebook has had a sharp eye for emerging companies that have succeeded
in areas it is eager to enter, like Instagram, the photo-sharing app it bought in 2012
for about $1 billion after intense negotiations. The service, which had
30 million users at the time, now has more than 150 million, and this
month, the first ads began appearing in users’ photo streams. In
addition, the two companies were a good fit.
Instagram is largely autonomous, but it uses Facebook’s vast resources
and advertising expertise while helping its parent company understand
how photos and video are changing social networks.
“Facebook and Instagram are spiritual brothers,” said Sam Altman, a tech
entrepreneur. “They are motivated by the same things and that is why it
worked out so well.”
Facebook’s recent $120 million purchase of the Israeli mobile software
company Onavo also fits squarely into its plans for the future. Onavo
gave Facebook important technology as well as vital information on how
competing apps are being used on iPhones and Android devices.
Other deals have not worked out so well, whether because of a lack of simpatico or something else.
“The gap between the billion-dollar valuation companies and the people
who are trying to do something fresh and new is growing,” said Frédéric
della Faille, the founder of Frontback, an up-and-coming social sharing
application. “Money is not the only goal. Do you need an enormous amount
of money to be happy, or are you content to go along with the ride?”
Recently, Facebook failed to acquire Waze, a crowdsourced mapping
service for drivers that provides real-time traffic and route updates.
Discussions dragged on for weeks with little progress, according to two
people with knowledge of the talks who declined to be named because they
were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. When an
agreement that gave Facebook exclusive negotiating rights expired,
Google snatched up Waze for about $1 billion.
As for Snapchat, its compatibility with Facebook is unclear. Snapchat is
centered on impermanence and offers privacy and anonymity. Facebook
constantly pushes users to share more and is rooted in real-world
identities and creating a permanent, largely public record of people’s
daily lives and interactions.
Given these differences, the Snapchat bid looks like an attempt to
corral back some of the cool factor in the form of young eyeballs. Three
years ago, Snapchat did not even exist, and Facebook, with a valuation
of $100 billion before its public offering, was the hot company. Now
with younger users preferring Snapchat — which says it processes nearly
as many photos as Facebook each day — Snapchat may well have the upper
hand.
“It’s head-scratching,” said Christopher Poole, 25, the founder of
4chan, the message board. “From a business perspective, I understand it.
But from a cultural perspective, it’s like, ‘Wait, what?’ ”
Mr. Poole said Facebook’s aggressive pursuit of Snapchat may point to an identity crisis of sorts.
“Does that mean that they’re willing to embrace an alternative to
Facebook identity, or does it mean that they feel that threatened by it
that they’d leave their own wheelhouse?
0 التعليقات
