by Jay Barmann
Originally appeared on Inside Social, October 24, 2018
Once upon a time, MySpace was where you linked up with friends online, posted a funny GIF or the occasional song, and then went about your day consuming content, shopping, and living your life elsewhere. These days, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Google, and Twitter each want to be your go-to hub for communicating, news reading, video watching, augmented reality playing, photo sharing, shopping, sports, gaming, and umpteen other things, and it's starting to feel like these efforts to be everything to everyone are going to come back to bite them all when the tastes of a fickle populace change.
This week Facebook acknowledged some of this overreach in a small way with a simplified redesign for Facebook Messenger. The updated app loses a couple of the widgets that were cluttering up its bottom nav bar (namely "Games" and "Home"), and puts the focus back on the app's original purpose: chat. "We’ve built a lot of capabilities over the years, but [Messenger] is not as simple as the app was when we first began our journey,” says head of Messenger Stan Chudnovsky to The Verge. “We had a decision to make here: we can continue to pile on, or we can build a new foundation that would really enable us to build simplicity and powerful features on top of something that’s new and something that goes back to its roots."
But take a look at the tabs on the Facebook mobile app's increasingly lengthy menu, and you'll find at least a handful of things you probably didn't even know were there like City Guides (still seemingly in beta form and devoid of much useful information), job listings, sports scores, weather, and a Town Hall section that shows you all your local, state, and federal representatives and how to follow or contact them. Facebook launched Watch, its bid to compete with YouTube, Netflix and Amazon in the original video space, in August 2017, but as of the middle of this year, 50 percent of Americans polled said they'd never heard of Facebook Watch, and another 24 percent said they'd heard of it but never looked at it. The company rolled it out globally in August 2018, but the question remains: With so much video content to keep up with on so many platforms, why does Facebook think it's going to succeed in this space? And just because they can afford to build a video platform and produce original content for it, does that meant they should?
Facebook is also going toe-to-toe with Google/Alphabet and Amazon with its Portal countertop devices, which are intended to facilitate more hands-free video chatting via Facebook Messenger with the help of an AI-enhanced camera. And there's apparently plans for a TV set-top version that will stream video, a la Apple TV and Roku, in addition to having a camera for video chat.
Meanwhile, Snapchat just unveiled a slate of new short-form, scripted video content for its Discover tab. And earlier this year Instagram launched IGTV with great fanfare, only to have virtually none of us watching or talking about it four months later. IGTV's own handpicked slate of video creators, many of whom already had established followings on YouTube, seemed to quickly bore of this second channel, which was essentially similar except for the vertical video format. New York Magazine's Intelligencer blog surveyed some teens about IGTV who said things like, "I’m still confused as to what the purpose is," and "I just think it’s really unnecessary and it’s a YouTube knockoff."
Snapchat has also sought to be a source for sports content for the youth market, particularly via ESPN's "SportsCenter on Snap." And ESPN is also going to be rolling out sports content for Twitter, which announced its own video content push in April featuring the likes of Disney, Viacom and Vice News.
But what if users really only ever wanted to use Snapchat to send ephemeral video and augmented photos of themselves to friends? And what if Instagram users really only want to look at and share pretty photos (and Snap-like "Stories"), and find their streaming video content where they've always found it, on Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube? And what if Facebook users would prefer to keep their cameras in their pockets where they belong, and would prefer to get reliable city guides from Lonely Planet and keep using their Apple TV to stream movies?
And on the subject of news, neither Facebook nor Twitter want to take responsibility for being arbiters of truth in the news sphere, and yet they have each become primary portals through which people across the world find their news. They can't have it both ways.
We all instinctively balk at monopolies, because we all instinctively understand that no one company can ever be great at everything — not to mention our traditionally American love of competition in the marketplace. Facebook has already raised eyebrows by copying the essential format of Snapchat with Stories on both Instagram and Facebook, and Snapchat is feeling the heat. And the launch of Portal couldn't have come at a worse time for the company — an op-ed in USA Today reflects the common, knee-jerk reaction that Facebook should not be trying to put cameras and microphones in our homes right now.
Taking paranoid arguments about privacy even further, Apple CEO Tim Cook just gave a speech in Europe railing against the "data industrial complex" of Google and Facebook, though he didn't name names. "Our own information — from the everyday to the deeply personal — is being weaponized against us with military efficiency," Cook said. "Your profile is a bunch of algorithms that serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into harm. We shouldn’t sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance." The backlash, he suggests, needs to come first in the form of government regulation.
It's understandable that companies as huge and rich as Facebook and Alphabet would try to expand into as many spaces as they can, but it seems like only a matter of time before a majority of these experiments fail (ahem, see Google+). And with each failure, the companies risk losing the trust and brand recognition they built with their signature products.
More urgently, it calls to question whether the money that a company like Facebook is throwing at arguably ill-fated experiments like Portal and Watch wouldn't be better spent on security measures and content moderation to address the grave global impacts that its platform has created.