In a ballooning 3,225 words a roughly average word count for the terminally verbose Facebook founder Zuckerberg informed his miserably loyal 2.3 billion plus subjects that his company has happened upon a concept known as privacy, and, in doing so, it sees an opportunity.
Unfortunately, no company can build anything interesting in the social media space because Facebook’s well-established wildly aggressive stance toward competitors means that the game is over before the game even begins.
Surely it’s pure coincidence that Facebook’s sudden interest in privacy comes as the company faces an ever-cresting tidal wave of public backlash and heavy breathing from thirsty regulators in Congress. Sated after sopping up all of the ad dollars drifting around the wreckage of a soul-crushingly monetized social web, Facebook realizes it’s probably time to chart a different path forward.
Milking Facebook’s stewardship of WhatsApp for all it’s worth, Zuckerberg was intentional about pitching his new centralized yet private future for Facebook around the model of the encrypted messaging app, a platform so antithetical to Facebook’s broad mission that its founders left in disgust after cashing their checks.
In recent years, the company realized that it’s easier to just to let someone else innovate, build a product and attract users than doing anything very interesting itself. Facebook’s contemporary role in the tech landscape is to either build a functional facsimile of it or swoop in and buy that innovation and keep it at arm’s length from the core Facebook brand for long enough for users to get sort of complacent .
Namely, because the company laid waste to the concept of user privacy so thoroughly before apparently flitting off just now to refashion itself into “a privacy-focused messaging and social networking platform” and stuffing users into the WhatsApp-branded life rafts.Original article