Just because WhatsApp will “operate independently” doesn’t mean Facebook won’t put its 6,000-employee muscle behind its new acquisition.
We’ve heard a lot about how WhatsApp will save Facebook from losing the
international messaging war, but sources close to the parent company
tell me it actually did a lot to help Instagram. Here are the ways you
can expect it to do the same for WhatsApp.
Engineering
Instagram CTO Mike Krieger apparently wasn’t sleeping much in months
before his company was bought by Facebook. In two years, Instagram had
grown to 27 million registered iOS users before launching on Android
where it picked up 1 million more in the first 24 hours.
Krieger was known to spend late nights fighting server fires to keep
Instagram from going down like the Hindenburg. With just a dozen total
employees, he didn’t have much help.
After
the acquisition, Krieger could suddenly call on Facebook’s massive,
world-class engineering team for help or guidance. When I saw him a few
months after the deal, he’d regained his youthful glow and looked like
he’d been sleeping more. Now imagine what life’s been like for WhatsApp
co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton. I’m gonna go on a hunch and say
“stressed”.
Over the past few months their service grew to serve 450 million users with just 32 engineers, each one supporting 14 million people. In Forbes’ profile of Koum, Parmy Olson writes
that during his often-missed kickboxing class “Every few minutes Koum
sits down for a break, slipping the gloves off and checking for messages
from Acton about WhatsApp’s servers.” Well lucky for them, the cavalry
has arrived.
WhatsApp will be able to draw on Facebook’s engineering know-how and
team if their code breaks or servers stumble. That could help prevent
outages and make WhatsApp work even faster, even if it doesn’t get
slapped with a Facebook logo or any other design changes.
Recruiting
At over 6,000 employees and rapidly growing, Facebook knows a lot about recruiting. It’s far from perfect, considering Facebook rejected Koum and Acton
when the two applied to work there around 2008, and it’s seen some
brain drain since the IPO. Still, the company has feelers out around the
world looking for top talent.Facebook can now pitch potential recruits a
spot at WhatsApp. Sure, the upside potential is diminished now it’s
already been acquired, but Facebook’s HR team can tempt people with the
chance to work on an app serving almost a half a billion people.
Considering
Facebook spent $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp, I’d bet it’d be willing
to pony up to pay for high-profile poaches from other companies, or
even smaller talent acquisitions to bring in whole teams of great
staffers. Facebook’s deep pockets could change the game for what was a
lean startup.
And some of that fresh blood could come from within Facebook itself. Instagram was able to lure Facebook’s Director Of Partnerships Emily White
to help it kick off its advertising effort as Director Of Business
Operations (though she’s since left for Snapchat). Facebook’s star
mobile product manager Peter Deng also slid over to Instagram
to become its Director Of Product. When top talent at Facebook gets a
bit restless, they could inject some excitement without leaving the
family by hopping to WhatsApp.
Spam
At moments in Instagram’s history, it’s had serious spam problems.
Comments with scam links, hacked accounts posting spam photos, fake
followers doling out likes in hopes of a follow-back so they could spam
you more. Before it was acquired, it wouldn’t allow third-party apps to post photos to its feed, and chose not to have a web presence that would invite spammers.
Thankfully Facebook had extensive experience fighting spam. It managed to cut spam by 95% in 2010 according to former CTO Bret Taylor.
In late 2012 it kill off 37% of fake Facebook accounts. Sources tell me Instagram got “plugged in” to Facebook’s spam prevention team, to help it get serious about integrity. Instagram began blocking spam comments posted to multiple photos, quickly squashed the Smoothie hack, and was able to open its API to posts from other apps.
For WhatsApp, Facebook’s spam fighters could help it banish malicious
users and stop hackers before they steal control of people’s accounts.
The intimate nature of mobile messaging makes spam messages
especially annoying. No company is 100% spam-proof, but thousands of
extra Facebook engineers with domain expertise should surely get
WhatsApp closer to that goal.
Growth
Facebook’s growth to 1.23 billion users is no accident. There’s a big team there dedicated
to the science of adding and retaining users. They have a whole office
lined with international flags and screens showing growth figures. The growth team’s tactics have become hallmarks of Facebook’s development style, as former member Andy Johns laid out in a Quora post.They
do intense A/B testing on every feature, often pushing dozens or even
hundreds of different versions of Facebook to different users through a
system called Gatekeeper to measure which changes are beneficial.
There’s
intense funnel optimization to boost signups, get users onboarded, keep
them engaged, and get them back if they lapse. Facebook even provides a
totally different experience for new users designed to get them enough
friends to fill their feed before they see the standard interface. Plus
there’s internationalization to make sure the app is translated into
every language and available on any type of phone.
Facebook’s growth team threw fuel on Instagram’s fire, helping it
rocket from 27 million iOS registrations and a few million Androiders to
the 150 million-plus active users it has today. It could give WhatsApp a
similar boost. Already at 450 million users and 1 million more signups
per day, WhatsApp hasn’t needed Facebook’s help, but now it can have it
if it wants. And I expect it will.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Koum said yesterday that not
monetization but growth is WhatsApp’s top priority. As we wrote
yesterday, Facebook bought WhatsApp because its
own Messenger was too far behind in the global messaging race, so
expanding that worldwide footprint across devices is crucial.
When Facebook says it’ll keep its hands off, that’s more about
product direction and external branding than what happens under the
hood. After paying so much to wrestle WhatsApp away from Google, you can
bet Facebook will do whatever it can to help it trounce SMS and the
other chat apps, even if users are none the wiser.
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