Zuckerberg on Mobile Apps: 'Facebook is Not One Thing'

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Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook Inc., speaks during an event in Menlo Park, California, U.S., on Thursday, April 4, 2013. Facebook unveiled smartphone software called Home that puts social-networking features front and center on a handset, stepping up efforts to boost sales of advertising on small screens.

Image: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images/Associated Press

By Todd Wasserman2014-04-16 14:34:15 UTC

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company's latest mission is to "unbundle the big blue app" and provide disparate experiences on mobile with or without the Facebook name.

"Facebook is not one thing, he told The New York Times . "On desktop where we grew up, the mode that made the most sense was to have a website, and to have different ways of sharing built as features within a website. So when we ported to mobile, that’s where we started — this one big blue app that approximated the desktop presence."

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Chief among Facebook's efforts to diversify its mobile portfolio is the $19 billion bid to purchase WhatsApp. Zuckerberg justified the expense by noting that the messaging space is bigger than the company realized and that consumers use it differently than Facebook's Messenger.

"Messenger is more about chatting with friends and WhatsApp is like an SMS replacement," he told The New York Times. "Those things sound similar, but when you go into the nuances of how people use it, they are both very big in different markets."

Zuckerberg said that Messenger is a "really successful thing" and that more than 10 billion messages a day flow through Facebook's messaging products. Facebook recently unbundled messaging functionality from Facebook's mobile app to encourage users to download the Messenger app instead. The company claims Messenger provides a better user experience.

The mobile initiatives are put under the auspices of Creative Labs, which the company has described as a "mindset" within the company rather than a group or department. Facebook announced Creative Labs in January when it introduced its Paper news reader app.

Zuckerberg didn't discuss how Paper is doing. Less than a month after launch, though, the app fell out of the top 100 free apps in Apple's App Store. He said however that Home, the company's mobile-based immersive experience introduced last April, was "much slower than we expected."

He added that assessing the success of Home, Messenger or other apps was premature:

The other thing that is important context to keep in mind is that, to some extent, most of these new things that we’re doing aren’t going to move any needles in our business for a very long time. The main Facebook usage is so big. About 20% of the time people spend on their phone is on Facebook. From that perspective, Messenger or Paper can do extremely well but they won’t move any needles.

Topics: Business, Facebook, Facebook Home, Facebook Paper, mark zuckerberg, Mobile