A redesigned Facebook app and desktop version of the site puts private groups in the centre of the page. Photo / AP
Facebook is getting a new face.
The company's "big blue" app is undergoing a redesign: its iconic blue bordering will be replaced by sleek white trim in the coming weeks, and the service will be redesigned around groups and around private messages.
Symbolically, the redesign - to be announced at Facebook's annual developer conference in the heart of Silicon Valley - represents Facebook's yearning to present a new face to the world after years of troubles.
But beyond that cosmetic change, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is starting to craft answers for what the future will look like for the social media giant, which also owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, collectively used by 2.7 billion people worldwide.
In an interview with The Washington Post on the eve of the conference, called F8, Zuckerberg said he was still weighing how to respond to criticism and potential regulation, the tradeoffs between safety and encryption and the future of the company's business. He spoke about reorienting the company's services toward the fast-growing arenas of private messaging, but he acknowledged that it may be years before these changes are operationalised - perhaps even longer before people trust those efforts.
People will start seeing some of these updates in the Facebook app right away, and the new desktop site will come in the next few months. pic.twitter.com/AQcNZPN1jW
— Facebook (@Facebook) April 30, 2019
"The next five years at least, maybe even the next 10 years, is building out the private platforms with the richness that the public platforms have had to date," he said. "That needs to get done with some amount of different infrastructure and different policies, and to some degree, different values, than in building out these public spaces."
Facebook is moving more deliberately now, he said. The "move fast and break things" era is over - a more cautious approach after crises such as Russian election interference, the live-streaming of massacres and of suicides, and calls to break up the social network over its lax approach to privacy.
Zuckerberg knows private messaging is capturing a growing share of people's attention, a motivation for moving the company in that direction. But Facebook still hasn't figured out how to make money off that behaviour. Ninety-nine per cent of the company's revenue comes from targeted advertising, from profiles that are tied to the information people collects about people, including what they post publicly on Facebook.
That information - valuable enough to turn Facebook into one of the world's wealthiest companies - cannot be derived from the new encrypted services Facebook is building, because encryption blocks outsiders, including the owners of encrypted services, from reading messages. That prevents targeted advertising and hinders Facebook's ability to hunt for bad actors such as Russian operatives, Zuckerberg acknowledged. Facebook is the second largest targeted advertising company in the world. Google, which on Monday reported slowing advertising growth, is first.
We just announced a fresh, new design for Facebook that makes communities as central as friends. FB5 is simpler, faster, more immersive and makes it easier to find what you're looking for and get to your most-used features. #f82019 pic.twitter.com/YWIGEnpO4M
— Facebook (@Facebook) April 30, 2019
Zuckerberg said he didn't know how much profit Facebook's new focus on encrypted messaging would generate. But he wasn't worried. "I don't know how good of a business it will be, but I am confident it will be good and we will be fine," he said in the interview.
Zuckerberg's comments reflected what has long been a truism about the internet: Wherever people's eyeballs go, dollars will follow.
"I think people assume that a lot of the value comes from data," he said. "What I've found is, there's certainly a reality to that, but I find that in the coverage that's out there, people underestimate how much of the value is coming from just people's attention."
His downplaying of data was surprising, given how much Facebook relies on it to power its business.
The tenor of the F8 conference has come to reflect Facebook's challenges. It is a buzzy gathering of thousands of engineers and other partners who build apps that utilise Facebook's trove of data for dating services, music recommendations, or to help their users log in with the company's "log in with Facebook" buttons. Thousands of people typically fill a large auditorium in San Jose, where they cheer announcements of new partnerships and features about things such as Facebook's Oculus virtual reality headset and new development in software infrastructure.
But in recent years, F8 has lost some momentum as Facebook has increasingly restricted developers' abilities to access data, a result of its shifting business and growing scrutiny of its privacy practices. At the same time, the company's problems have take up as much attention as any of its product releases. Two years ago, Zuckerberg offered condolences to the family of a man whose killing had been broadcast on the company's video-streaming platform Facebook Live.
Last year, Zuckerberg announced a privacy tool called Clear History, which still hasn't launched.
This year, Zuckerberg used his keynote to tout the the growing focus on private groups and encrypted messages, and he detailed a vision for turning his conglomerate of apps into a single unified service that is more powerful - though perhaps not more profitable - than each of its parts. Each of these changes is fairly abstract and years away from being operationalised, Zuckerberg acknowledged.
The most tangible news of F8 will be the cosmetic change to Facebook itself, to "the big blue app," as it is known within the company. For billions of Facebook users, the quintessential blue bordering on top of the page is as synonymous with Facebook as the "like" button. This is the first major redesign of the app in five years, and it will roll out on mobile and desktop in the coming weeks.
The color change is part of a redesign that reflects the company's philosophical shift. Newsfeed, the scrolling feed of posts that has gotten Facebook into so much trouble with fake news and viral Russian disinformation, will still be front and center when a user opens the app. But it is becoming much easier to toggle away from it and move into a different kind of experience, like a private group. Such groups are one part of Facebook where people are actually spending more time and still posting the kind of intimate information that few people dare to share publicly as a status update anymore.
And the big blue app - the one Americans and Europeans are increasingly deleting or tapering off of, according to Facebook's own numbers - will be less recognizable, a symbol of Facebook wanting to put on a new face to the world. The redesign cleans up its busy interface with simpler tabs that allow people to quickly navigate to its video entertainment service Facebook Watch; to its Craigslist copycat, Marketplace; and to private Groups. (Some of these features look a lot like tabs on the home-booking site Airbnb.)
Redesigns aren't always a slam dunk. Previous redesigns of tech products provoked backlash, such as when Twitter introduced a new timeline or when Snapchat redesigned its app, eliciting complaints from power users of the service.
Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp are also getting updates. Instagram will make follower counts and "like" counts less prominent - to make the service feel "less pressurized," according to its leader, Adam Mosseri. Messenger will become available on desktop, and people will soon be able to message one another between Facebook's various apps.
Facebook's dating service, announced at F8 last year and still in a nascent phase, will add a feature called Secret Crush, in which users can select up to nine friends they are interested in. Facebook will match people together if the interest is mutual.
Behind the new face are many pressing questions to which Zuckerberg didn't have immediate answers. He said he didn't know whether unifying the company's services would expose him to more criticism that Facebook should be broken up-calls to do so are being made by Democratic Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and others. Nor did he know whether those calls to break up Facebook were the right remedy to Facebook's problems.
He pointed out that Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp and Instagram have given people more variety and choices, not fewer, because the company has turbocharged the growth of those services since they were first acquired. Focusing on specific fixes, such as improving the integrity of elections, data portability and privacy were more likely to address people's "biggest concerns" than breaking up the company, he said.
And there were distinct advantages to Facebook's big size, Zuckerberg pointed out: Last year, he said, the amount the company spent on safety was greater than the entire revenue of Twitter.
On political microtargeting, Zuckerberg said he had considered getting rid of it entirely. The tools let political advertisers target people by demographics, ZIP codes and other interests. They were used by Russian operatives, and critics have said that they allow political actors to exploit people psychologically. Zuckerberg acknowledged that the tool caused him headaches, but he said he ultimately came to the conclusion that they help level the playing field for local politicians and smaller campaigns and were therefore too valuable to scrap.
At least five times in the interview, Zuckerberg said he didn't know or didn't have an answer to a question, an admission of the company's desire to evolve.
Zuckerberg said he didn't know whether Facebook could do as good a job policing election integrity or tackling abuse once it could no longer read messages, but he insisted that consumers would reward privacy in the end. He didn't know whether there was much difference between his vision of privacy and the one Apple CEO Tim Cook, another Facebook critic, has been espousing for several years. He didn't know whether the encrypted future would be more profitable than the current one.
But, as Zuckerberg said, he is confident all will be fine.
The industry faces challenges but hopes to bring newcomers and veterans together.