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Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram Try To Explain How They Don't Really Compete

This article is more than 9 years old.

Facebook has spent $19 billion to buy messaging startup WhatsApp and an almost quaint $1 billion or so to buy photo messaging startup Instagram. Then Wednesday at its F8 developers conference, the company announced that its Messenger app will become an all-encompassing messaging, e-commerce and marketing app all in one.

What's up with that? Isn't Facebook competing against itself with all these messaging services? Not according to the leaders of each operation, who appeared together to lay out how they view their respective, seemingly overlapping roles.

Onstage at the conference's afternoon keynote were David Marcus, Facebook's VP of messaging and the executive who introduced the Messenger platform earlier today; Brian Acton, cofounder of WhatsApp; Mike Krieger, cofounder and technical lead at Instagram; and moderator Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. You can watch the livestream, but here are the sometimes paraphrased highlights of what they had to say at the second big event of the two-day conference:

Meeker gives a mini version of her ubiquitous mobile presentation, basically saying: It's growing really, really fast. No kidding.

Acton says WhatsApp took off when it made person-to-person messaging dead simple, even on feature phones. Within four years, we were at 500 million users, now 750 million. We knew in December 2009 we had something big.

Krieger and cofounder Kevin Systrom also had a mobile app, Brbn, that did too much and tried to figure out what the one problem was that they wanted to solve. There are a lot of similarities to WhatsApp. We had a million users within a month and a half of launching in December 2010.

As for Marcus, he came from eBay and PayPal when he saw the potential of Messenger. Increasingly, he says, people communicate on messaging programs over any other medium (well, except F2F). It's still early days.

Meeker: How did you decide to partner with Facebook? Krieger says the engineering team is five or six times bigger now, bringing more diversity to the engineering. The challenge is making sure people still feel they have a mission. Acton says one thing WhatsApp looked to was the success of integrating Instagram, which persuaded him and Koum they could fit in. Facebook has rounded out our business.

Meeker: What are one or two lessons you've learned? Marcus says which app is going to remain on top and sustainable that people will want to use over time depends on a platform like Facebook. Krieger says if he had a tattoo, it would be, Do the simple things first. We just used a lot of dumb technologies that aren't shiny or new but get the job done. Simplicity applies just as much to the product itself, Acton says.

Meeker: You each have three similar but different services. How do you collaborate and compete? (Yay, thanks for asking, Mary!) Acton says they're developing products independently. Platform is not top of mind for us, for instance--it's all about the product at WhatsApp. We share technologies and infrastructure, but there's no strong competition.

For Krieger's part, there's a far greater cultural mobility, meaning engineers can move from one operation to another.

Meeker: David, you introduced some new products. How things are going in the last six hours? The news has been well-received by developers, he says.

Meeker: How about new services on Instagram and WhatsApp? Krieger says improved search was really key, driving a lot of traffic. WhatsApp's voice feature was a big focus of the last year, Acton says.

Meeker: What's important for the next year and beyond? For WhatsApp, it's mostly about just making the app work on a wide variety of devices and services. Instagram cares especially about time spent on the app, so reliability is really key, Krieger says. For Messenger, the key is enhancing people's ability to communicate on Messenger vs. other platforms.

Meeker: What have you learned from users outside the U.S.? Acton, whose company is largely a non-U.S. phenomenon, says they've learned the world has very diverse problems that get in the way of good messaging.

Meeker: How did you fix problems in countries where uptake was slow? We were broadly looking at user feedback and problems they having, such as delayed push notifications or failures in the domain-name system, Acton says. You basically have to slog it out. And take the time to put in the small tweaks and changes to get the notifications through.

Instagram is quite international too--70% non-U.S. We needed to make the service work and look good on all kinds of Android and other devices. The older phones need the most love. It's a slog. Getting to a culture where that's very much championed is very important to us.

Meeker: Are there other features, akin to payments, that you want to push in new markets? Messenger launches payments last week, of course, Marcus says, but has no plans to open cross-border payments yet. One thing Instagram did early was local integrations in some countries where an alternative to Twitter or Facebook was more popular. One feature WhatsApp built was broadcast, but while it's not popular in the U.S., it's enormously popular in some countries, says Acton.

Meeker: Asynchronous, instant text communication didn't use to exist before WhatsApp, so will it still be a dominant way to communicate in five years? Acton says the text element has advantages--it's simple, silent. I don't think it will go away in five years. The asynchronous part is key, Krieger says--you don't have to get something instantly, at least with Instagram. Basic text messaging is going to remain core, Marcus says, so the question is whether you can upgrade such a platform to say, include phone capability.

Meeker: Who's responsible for monitoring the user experience and how do you make sure the whole organization knows it's important? Koum and Acton are still heavily involved, so people from the outside email us directly. In many ways, he says, we're the guardians of the experience. Likewise, at Facebook, it's still a builder culture, says Marcus, and they have the right analytics to figure out which feature or interface element is best.

Meeker: There's a theory that all your products will morph into one in five years. How do you prevent that from happening and avoid adding new stuff? (Thanks for not letting that go, Mary.) I'm a purist to the user experience, Acton says, and the users aren't writing in asking for an all-in-one product. When the time comes, we'll do it in a proper fashion. Marcus says the way they did the Messenger platform was not to build Instagram and WhatsApp capabilities into the platform itself. Instead, the idea is to create a platform that allow them to work on their own. For Krieger, it's a matter of each app having rather different audiences that want different things.

Meeker: What product features would each of you like in your own product? Marcus likes the infinite scrolling of Instagram and the reliability of WhatsApp. Krieger wants WhatsApp on the iPhone.

Now, questions from the audience:

Q: When will WhatsApp have its own API? (Yes, this is a software developer conference--he's referring to Application Programming Interface, the code that allows other developers to use its services in their own). Acton's answer: Not now. Later he answers someone else with the same question with the same answer: No, we don't have plans at this time. We want to be careful about not inundating people with messages they don't want. The user experience is what we have to hold sacred.

Q: What about transactional messages where the user wants the interaction? Acton says he understands, but it's not the immediate priority.

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