Install Facebook On Your Phone And Browser Faster Than ChromeFacebook's Plan To Own Your Phone | Fast Company. Mark Zuckerberg streams through the crowd at the Concourse Exhibition Center in San Francisco like a politician working a pancake breakfast. As the Facebook CEO makes the rounds at f. Fifteen hundred hackers have amassed, the first time Zuck has called this flock together in two and a half years. ![]() Keeping up with friends is faster than ever. See what friends are up to, share updates, photos, and videos, and get notified when friends like and comment on your posts. See what's new with your Facebook friends from inside. And not just because it's Facebook It turns out uninstalling Facebook for Android is pretty great. By Russell Holly Tuesday, Jan 19, 2016 at 11:26 am EST. They're here to attend engineering sessions about how to build, grow, and monetize their apps; to munch on plastic- wrapped sandwiches trucked up from Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters; and to try to catch a glimpse of Zuck casually hanging out by the Oculus Rift demo, a sight even more surreal for them than the virtual- reality experience itself. Despite the stuffy heat—the 1. Facebook had to import its own ventilation ducts, which hum along the wooden ceilings—Zuck looks cool and relaxed in his T- shirt and jeans. He walks tall, chest out firmly, and with each quick hello he leaves a trail of starstruck smiles and excited whispers in his wake, as if Harry Styles were strolling through a suburban shopping mall. ![]() As one beaming attendee says after shaking hands with the CEO, "He seems pretty fucking confident!"Zuck, now 3. His company is crushing it. Monthly active users: up to almost 1. Engagement: up, with more than 5. Flurry, spending 1. Facebook's app, far and away the most popular service on i. ![]()
OS and Android devices. Speaking of mobile, Facebook, which spent all of 2. One particular ad unit—the one that suggests apps a Facebook user might want to download—is the envy of the entire industry and is being widely copied. Revenue for the first quarter of 2. The company earned profits of $6. These feats are even more impressive when you consider that Zuck is delivering these results with a core product that has been criticized for being as stagnant as it is ubiquitous, a place where parents and grandparents share photos of kids who may be less likely to embrace the service when they grow up. In a world churning out startups with one innovation after another—Snapchat, Tinder, Whisper—Facebook can seem like yesterday's news. Yet how many businesses see revenue and engagement surge just as passion for their products stalls? Zuck went on a shopping spree last February and March that seemed, on first blush, downright desperate. On February 1. 9, Facebook announced its acquisition of global- messaging phenomenon Whats. App for almost $1. Five weeks later, Zuck shelled out $2 billion for the promising virtual- reality headset company Oculus VR. Two days after that, he spent $2. Yes, drones. Although Zuck has outlined his three- , five- , and 1. But after dozens of interviews with current and former employees, rivals, advertisers, developers, and users, it becomes clear that Zuckerberg has launched Facebook on an aggressive and potentially brilliant strategy—one that has very little to do with the company you think you know based on your desktop use of its social network. Facebook granted Fast Company access to several company executives, but not to Zuckerberg or COO Sheryl Sandberg.] To make Facebook more relevant than ever, the company has targeted the very core of the app economy to fulfill its vision for the next half- decade. As the six lessons that follow illuminate, the great social network of the early 2. Facebook a part of just about every social interaction that takes place around the world. To understand where Facebook is going, you need to start by understanding where it's been. Remember Poke? How about Gifts, or Beacon? Graph Search? Camera? Facebook email? Places? Deals? If none of these ring a bell, don't worry. They're all Facebook products introduced in the past seven years—and they were all failures. Together these missteps have become symbols of a culture where innovation has seemingly evaporated. It's even infected Facebook's subsidiary Instagram, whose two big releases since being acquired—video sharing and Direct Message—flopped, according to a source familiar with the company's metrics. Facebook rejects this characterization.)The most prominent failure of all, perhaps, was Home. Introduced on April 4, 2. Jobsian flair and blockbuster expectations, Home was a novel software experience created to give users a distinctive Facebook- first way of using Android phones. A lot of people came over from Apple to work on this stuff," says a product manager on the project. But Home bombed, receiving a tepid reception from critics and an even worse one from consumers. Just a month after launch, HTC, Facebook's hardware partner, slashed the price of its phone that came preinstalled with Home to 9. Everybody was disappointed," says the manager. How did Facebook find itself in this predicament? The company's culture, forged in its earliest days, has been built around a motto— "Move fast and break things"—that has become so famous it almost stands as the preeminent cliché of Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg encouraged an environment where employees understand that it is better to build and prototype an idea rather than just talk about it. Code wins arguments," says Will Cathcart, an engineering lead at Facebook, repeating another of the company's mantras. This philosophy, known as the hacker way, provided the fuel for Facebook's ascension. But it has hit roadblocks along the way. For one thing, as the company has grown to include almost 7,0. Facebook remained overly dependent on Zuckerberg, whose blessing has been required for projects to gain steam beyond their origins in Red Bull–fueled hackathons. You face the reality of large organizations, where it's hard to convince anyone to give you resources [for an idea]," says one product manager who recently left to build his own app. There's that lure of saying, 'You know what? I'm too worn out to fight [for this idea inside Facebook]; I'll just leave and try doing it on my own.' "Projects that did fight their way through the system faced other burdens rooted in the company's history. The "truth" of data is so paramount at Facebook that products were given little time to improve after launch. A startup would try again or change it," that recently departed manager says of Facebook's graveyard of failed products. But that kind of culture doesn't exist at Facebook. If something doesn't work off the bat, it's like, 'Okay, the metrics aren't working, let's put the engineers over here.' " One nasty by- product of this approach: demoralized employees. Bret Taylor, Facebook's former CTO and now the founder of a document- creation app called Quip, traces the situation back to Facebook's earliest success: the integration of photo sharing into the News Feed. Almost by accident, Facebook became the world's largest photo- sharing site, "creating a dynamic," says Taylor, "where, when you were thinking of a new product, it was always integrating with News Feed—just like the photos product did, because that's what drove all of its usage and traffic. The conventional wisdom was that if you don't do that, there's no way you're going to grow as fast." The problem with this is obvious when you compare the litany of Facebook failures (Beacon, Places, Poke, and so on) with successful social apps that have become popular over the same time. Consider Snapchat. Predicting the success of ephemeral photos would have been impossible. And that's just one of an endless stream of startups experimenting with new ways for people to communicate with one another. A social media startup can be bootstrapped very cheaply. Whats. App, after all, grew to almost half Facebook's size with just 5. Snapchat (which Facebook tried to purchase more than once) became a perceived threat with even fewer people. Which means that Facebook faces an eternal game of Whack- a- Mole as it tries to predict what's a fad and what's the future. Throw in the impediments of data and bureaucracy, and the chances of creating a breakthrough app within Facebook become slim indeed. Zuck seemed to acknowledge this challenge when he announced a division last February called Creative Labs, which functions as a separate space outside of Facebook's traditional product teams, for "things that are nascent." At the same time, Facebook revealed what it said was the first Creative Labs product: Paper, an elegantly designed mobile app for reading and responding to your News Feed. Creative Labs allows teams to go off with very loose time constraints and think about problems," says Scott Goodson, a leader on the Paper team and a former senior software engineer at Apple. A lot of the core people came here because they saw that level of freedom—they wanted its small- team feel."If you start asking questions about Creative Labs, though, it becomes less clear just what Zuck and company have learned from their product misadventures. There's no Creative Labs building; there's no, like, Creative Labs organization," admits Cathcart, who serves as the engineering lead for several (but not all) projects that Facebook has anointed with the Creative Labs moniker. Cathcart describes Creative Labs as more of a framework. It's one with a striking familiarity. Honestly, a lot of it is Mark," he says, meaning that the way an idea gets green- lighted as a Creative Labs project is exactly as it's always been. One thing that does seem to be different: Facebook seems willing to be more patient and iterate on ideas rather than just scrap them. Paper, which was in development before Facebook devised Creative Labs, has grown slowly, at least in Facebook terms, and it is being downloaded less and less. But during Facebook's first- quarter earnings call, Zuck said that products like it will be given room to grow and come into their own, indicating that the company won't even worry about trying to make money from any app until it reaches more than 1. Facebook has even decided to try to develop another Snapchat- like service after its first knockoff attempt, Poke, disappeared almost instantly. All this signals that Facebook can't simply follow its long- standing hacker playbook.
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