In a town hall meeting yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg was bombarded by a multitude of queries and answered some of the questions that have been on most people’s minds.
The world’s youngest billionaire, for example, explained why Facebook annoyed all of its loyal users by requiring them to download a separate messaging app to their cell in addition to the basic Facebook app.
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Here is his answer: “Asking everyone in our community to install a new app is a big ask. I appreciate that that was work and required friction. We wanted to do this because we believe that this is a better experience. Messaging is becoming increasingly important. On mobile, each app can only focus on doing one thing well, we think.”
Apparently sue to the incredibly high volume of messaging, 10 billion per day, Facebook felt that its basic app would not be handle all of the traffic on its own. Zuckerberg explained that the best messaging apps are the ones that only engage in messaging.
“Asking folks to install another app is a short term painful thing, but if we wanted to focus on serving this [use case] well, we had to build a dedicated and focused experience, ” the Facebook founder explained.
So Facebook annoyed millions of people for their own good. What is it, a social network or our parents?
Zuckerberg said that the decision to add the messaging app was part of the hardest job that they do at Facebook. He probably relaxes after making one of these really tough choices as he described it by rolling around in his piles of cash.
On why he always wears the same shirt Zuckerberg said, “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community.”
Again he did it for us. Choosing what to wear when you get up in the morning is so tasking that it might affect how he decides to spend his billions. Zuckerberg got the idea from Einstein who always wore the same clothing too. But Einstein probably did a lot more hard thinking.
Zuckerberg also pointed to the $25 million that he personally donated to the fight against Ebola in response to one critic who said that Facebook only got involved in the issue as a PR stunt.
