Facebook is Becoming a Bigger Replacement for "Communications"

We are by now well into the process of non-traditional communication modes disrupting telco products. Now Facebook is taking moves that move it more centrally into person-to-person messaging.

“I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won't stick around forever,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO. “We plan to start by making it possible for you to send messages to your contacts using any of our services, and then to extend that interoperability to SMS too.”

“With the ability to message across our services, however, you'd be able to send an encrypted message to someone's phone number in WhatsApp from Messenger,” says Zuckerberg. “You can already send and receive SMS texts through Messenger on Android today, and we'd like to extend this further in the future, perhaps including the new telecom RCS standard.”

“In a few years, I expect future versions of Messenger and WhatsApp to become the main ways people communicate on the Facebook network,” he said.

“We plan to build this the way we've developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case -- messaging -- make it as secure as possible, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services,” said Zuckerberg.

That moves Facebook more centrally into communications, and away from a “social network.” “But one great property of messaging services is that even as your contacts list grows, your individual threads and groups remain private,” he said. “This is different from broader social networks, where people can accumulate friends or followers until the services feel more public.”

It is not as though Facebook services replace the “telco” completely, but it is a major expansion of Facebook presence as a platform for communications that otherwise might be thought the purview of a telecom company.