In 2013, Mark Zuckerberg made an important and little-noted design decision about his website: He dropped the "acebook." All that remained was an extremely modest logo, a box tens of pixels high containing that familiar lowercase "f". Look at your Timeline today, and the only place you'll see the full name of the company is at the bottom, in tiny grey text next to the copyright symbol.
Was Zuck becoming modest in his late 20s? Hardly. It was a shrewd psychological tactic: Facebook is ubiquitous, that tiny "f" said, and so famous we don't even need to mention it. Just look at its apps. If I say "Messenger," there's no need to brand that with the F-word: You know exactly what app and service I'm talking about. We saw the kerfuffle when the company closed out its first decade by releasing an app called Paper, despite the fact that there's already a very popular app called Paper.
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Heisenberg may have needed his opponents to say his name to feel successful. Facebook is successful when you don't have to.
It's an odd kind of humblebrag, this nameless ubiquity, but it is also accurate. 1.2 billion people now use Facebook at least once a month, a number which grew by roughly 20% in the last year. At some point that growth has to slow — there are only 2.5 billion humans on the Internet, after all — but there's no sign of that happening yet. Even the much-vaunted decline in teenagers using Facebook turned out to be a tempest in a teacup.
Then came the $19 billion earthquake known as the WhatsApp acquisition. It was a move of breathtaking arrogance or audacity, depending on your point of view. But to see Zuckerberg discuss it at Mobile World Congress Monday was to witness a man of preternatural calm, utterly at ease with outlandish business decisions.
WhatsApp, Zuckerberg said, was actually "worth more than $19 billion, even though it's hard to make that case today." There was no bluster, no bombast in this statement; it was merely that 70% of its users engage with it every day, and that "few services in the world can reach 1 billion users, and they are all valuable." (WhatsApp currently has a shade under 500 million users, but is growing faster than just about anything else out there.)
See also: Will WhatsApp Reach 1 Billion Users Faster Than Facebook Did?
More importantly, Zuckerberg spent as much time talking about WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, who will join the Facebook board, as he spoke about the app itself — as if he'd spent that money just to fund someone else's vision. "I was just really excited to take Jan up on [the deal], and to help him realize his dream of connecting a lot more people," Zuckerberg said.
It's good for Zuckerberg to be self-effacing. The user numbers he's talking about are almost beyond our comprehension. Even if we take the conservative estimate that there's 50% overlap in users between WhatsApp and Facebook, we're still talking about roughly 2 billion people on the planet using a Facebook-owned product within the next year or so.
That's not counting Internet.org, Zuckerberg's grand scheme to get the next billion or so people online, mostly in developing countries, via free services on cheap cellphones — the so-called "dial tone for the Internet." The Internet.org lineup of services hasn't been finalized yet, but no prizes for guessing which social network and texting services are likely to be included.
It is a little strange that we seem to be sleepwalking into this global monopoly, with nary a regulatory finger being lifted. Some of this has to do with the false conventional wisdom that Facebook is losing users (it isn't), that it is somehow being replaced by Snapchat in the teen mindset (actually augmented, not replaced), or that it is desperately clutching at straws with its Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions.
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Nothing could be further from the truth. Zuckerberg is quietly building up a posse of like-minded, self-effacing, world-conquering geniuses (Koum and Instagram founder Kevin Systrom). He has built a company that is nimble and restless, with hacking and authority-defying baked into its corporate culture. Zuckerberg has learned from the mistakes of monopolies past — he's no haughty Rockefeller or surly Bill Gates. He's even willing to fund his competitors, which is what happened with the short-lived anti-Facebook, Diaspora.
And Zuckerberg has deftly shaped a social network into a utility, as seemingly necessary and often-used as electricity. I have plenty of friends who complain about Facebook — but they're all still on Facebook, and post there frequently. (I only know one case of someone removing themselves entirely from the service, and that's Mashable reporter Sam Laird, who explains why, here.)
The network effect is in Facebook's favor, and may well be for decades to come. It's a self-reinforcing loop: All of your friends are on it, so you have to stay on it, so your friends stay on it. Bringing up the well-worn examples of MySpace or Friendster won't do any good, here, because neither of those services ever had anything like this level of adoption. Saying there has to be some sort of definitive end to Facebook's reign is like saying people are going to stop emailing or texting (or, as it may soon become known, WhatsApping.)
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Facebook even seems immune to the notion of social-media exhaustion, thanks to its story-surfacing algorithm. Go off Twitter for a week or two, and what you're faced with on your return is a cacophony of unfamiliar conversations. The anxiety of trying to catch up on tweets can be hard to bear. But go off Facebook for weeks at a time, and you're basically fine. The algorithm has you covered, more or less. Important changes in your friends' lives will rise to the top. The prodigal user is welcomed back.
The social network is often criticized for not responding to breaking news fast enough, but that may actually be to its advantage. There's a pleasing timelessness to it. Check it too often, and it'll show you the same stories, almost like a mother warning you not to sit too close to the TV. Facebook and Zuckerberg are in it for the long haul. There's no need to rush your consumption. That tiny, ubiquitous "f" is going to rule the social lives of our planet for the foreseeable future — with no clear competitor. Better get used to it.
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