Facebook Messenger: inside Zuckerberg's app for everything (2024)

Beneath a yawning seven-metre-high Frank Gehry ceiling -- its outer shell covered by a 3.5-hectare Mark Zuckerberg-devised giant rooftop park; its pristine 40,000-square-metre interior decorated with posters imploring staff to "Move Fast And Break Things" and "Think Wrong" - David Marcus, a former president of PayPal, is calmly explaining to WIRED what he calls "one of the biggest opportunities in tech in the next ten years".

When Marcus made the surprise jump to Facebook to run its messaging division in August 2014, its Messenger app had 300 million monthly active users. A year later, when WIRED visits Facebook's cavernous new Menlo Park HQ in California, Messenger is up to 700 million actives, with more than a billion Android downloads - yet his team of 200 has taken what Marcus calls mere "baby steps" towards the ultimate ambition of building the company's next great global platform. "As Messenger has grown, we think this service has the potential to help people express themselves in new ways, to connect hundreds of millions of new people, and to become a communication tool for the world," Zuckerberg told 2,000 developers at his company's F8 conference in San Francisco in March, as he announced that Messenger was becoming so much more than just an app. "Helping people communicate more naturally with businesses will improve, I think, almost every person's life because it's something everyone does."

It's the job of Marcus, a gently spoken 42-year-old French-born fintech guy, to turn a proprietary messaging app into this all-encompassing platform - essentially, an operating system on which third-party apps, and entire businesses, can be built in ways that lock them into the Facebook ecosystem. The Chinese have already shown what's possible: social media giant Tencent enables 600 million people each month to book taxis, check in for flights, play games, buy cinema tickets, manage banking, reserve doctors' appointments, donate to charity and video-conference all without leaving Weixin, the Chinese version of its WeChat app.

"The messaging era is definitely now," Marcus says. "It's the one thing people do more than anything else on their phone. Some people were surprised when I joined Facebook, but it's because I believe that messaging is the next big platform. In terms of time spent, attention, retention - this is where it's happening. And it's a once in a generation opportunity to build it." Or, as Zuckerberg acknowledged in a public Q&A last November, "Messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking." And, after initially being slow to respond to the rise of mobile - which he sought to make up by buying WhatsApp and Instagram - he wasn't now going to let Facebook fall into second place.

Messenger began as a simple messaging app for iOS and Android in August 2011. In April 2014, it was separated from the main Facebook app; users would have to download it separately to collect mobile messages. Some questioned why the company was competing with its own acquisition, WhatsApp, bought two months earlier for what was then $19 billion (£12.5bn). But over the next year, as WhatsApp remained lean, Messengerfunctionality kept growing - video and voice calls, peer-to-peer payments, location-sharing - even as its use was made independent of a Facebook account. And then, at F8, Zuckerberg revealed his cards. "Until now, we've focused on improving Messenger by building all these features ourselves," he declared. "Today we're going to talk about the next step. We're introducing Messenger Platform." Messenger would be opened to outside developers - initially 40 pre-selected partners, including ESPN, Giphy, Boostr, Dubsmash and Talking Tom - to build new "tools for expression" that would let users create and share content inside the app. But Messenger would also, he revealed, let users communicate with businesses just as if they were friends - through simple conversation threads that would let them "make a reservation, buy something, change shipping information..."

In a statement provided by Facebook, Zuckerberg explains that building Messenger into a broader, more comprehensive communications tool is key to his wider strategy for Facebook. "Our goal is to help everyone around the world connect. It's a pretty broad goal, but we want everything we do to tie back to that," he says. "It's a big space. There are lots of different ways that people want to share and communicate. In a lot of countries, as much as 99 per cent of the people online will use SMS or send text messages - with people sending 15-20 messages or more every single day." Which makes Messenger "one of the fastest growing and most important members of our family".