Photo: Ariel Zambelich / WIRED.
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED
Facebook, the company that makes billions from connecting people to each other, is about to make it harder to have a conversation. In the coming weeks, Facebook’s mobile app will be losing its chat feature, a move that will no doubt annoy many regular users. But the gutting likely won’t end there. According to many Facebook watchers, the end of chat is just the first cut in what could eventually lead to the end of Facebook as a single, unified app altogether.

The resounding consensus among the Facebook experts I talked to is that the company is finally making the jump to thinking and acting like an app maker, a software company the keeps functionality narrow and targeted. While users may grow attached to services that work the way they’re used to, like the full-featured Facebook app, the growing Silicon Valley consensus is that people really want a more bite-sized future.Facebook notified users and confirmed to the press yesterday that instant messaging functionality will be disappearing from its iOS and Android apps in the coming weeks. If users want to keep chatting, they’ll have to download Facebook’s separate Messenger app. It’s one thing to roll out specialized apps like Messenger, Paper, and Camera as optional alternatives for using Facebook, but quite another to force the issue and risk a real sacrifice in user engagement. Some people will upgrade to the Messenger app right away; many others will not. The net result, at least in the short-term, will be fewer people to chat with. Why would Facebook make that kind of sacrifice?
“In mobile we see simple, clear, snackable experiences winning,” says Matt Murphy, who manages the app-focused iFund at venture capital shop Kleiner Perkins. “When you introduce complexity, it can dilute the overall experience.”

Facebook: A Second-Class Experience

Facebook itself has said its flagship app dilutes the messaging experience, which is why, according to the company, users reply to messages 20 percent more in the Messenger app than in the main Facebook App. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself has complained that chat inside the Facebook app is a “second-class thing.”
In a way, everything inside the Facebook app is a second-class thing. That’s why the company has been steadily breaking out big chunks of functionality into separate apps over the past two years.
“The Facebook experience is three experiences in one,” says Simon Khalaf, CEO of app tracking firm Flurry. “One is photo sharing; the wall, which is news; and the third is communication. And they’ve broken that up into three applications.”
For photo sharing, Facebook has both Instagram and the Facebook Photos app. For news, it has Paper. And for communication, it has Messenger.

Building the Escape Pod

It’s enough to make one wonder what functionality will be left in the core Facebook app in a few years, once the company has unbundled everything. In mature markets like the U.S., Facebook’s user base has essentially stopped growing. Meanwhile, as users move from desktop Facebook to mobile Facebook, they’re not necessarily using the product as much. Instead, they sometimes turn to competitors like SnapChat and one-time competitors like Facebook-owned WhatsApp.
“A skeptical view of the decisions is that this is Facebook is trying to build an escape pod to a better place as the mother ship starts to stall out,” says Eric Eldon, co-founder of Inside Facebook, former editor-in-chief of TechCrunch, and a longtime journalist. “A gentler one is that they’re just trying to solidify usage of a part of FB that has a lot of unrealized potential … . My guess is that they’re worried about long-term trends around the core Facebook experience and see the popularity of rival messaging apps interfering with Facebook in some sort of deadly way.”
Either way, the move is a crystal clear indication that Facebook is truly serious about splitting its service out into a constellation of mobile apps. There’s no question Facebook’s decision to end chat in its flagship app will be a huge near-term blow to activity levels on its chat network. The Facebook app is widely installed, ranking among the most downloaded apps on both Apple and Google’s app stores. And every time anyone opened that app, they were logged in to Facebook chat — until now.
Of course, having bought WhatsApp, Facebook can afford to take a short-term hit in chat. After all, it just acquired around 500 million messaging users. The time is now ripe for Facebook to transition from being an omnibus social networking website to a factory that churns out compelling social apps, all united on the backend by the same social graph. By relinquishing all those chat users, at least for now, who won’t migrate from the Facebook app to Messenger, the company is making clear it won’t let today’s priorities and profits hold back tomorrow’s innovation. If Facebook can continue to make bold calls like this one, it will undermine the idea, commonly held in technology circles, that the dominant innovators in one computing era almost inevitable are blindsided by the next.