18. What's next for Facebook messaging, with Messenger's Stan Chudnovsky

It's time to geek out. Hello and welcome to Geek Out with Matt Navarra, with me, Matt Navarra.

And me, Martin SFP Bryant. Messenger from Facebook is 10 years old this month, so what better time to speak to the person who heads up the messaging app that's more than just a messaging app? Stan Chudnovsky.

Yes, Stan joined us for a live Twitter Space to talk about the future of Messenger as more than just an app, the challenges of encrypting all your conversations, the way Messenger is following the rest of social media in targeting businesses and creators, and a whole lot more.

We only had a small amount of his time, but we crammed a lot into it. So here's what happened when we spoke to Stan Chudnovsky.

Hey, Matt, can you hear me?

I can indeed. How are you doing today?

I'm doing great. How are you? I was listening to you guys speak. Enjoying your conversation.

No problem. Well, we recognize that you're a very busy man, and we've got tons of stuff that we wanted to chat about. So, I thought the thing that we'd kick off and chat about is, for those that don't know you, can you just quickly, in a nutshell, tell us what your role is there, what you kind of get involved in day to day?

So, I am running, helping, supporting Messenger.org. So, what that involves is that the app that you use hopefully every day. Sounds like many of you do. And then there is also a platform that supports all those people-to-people, person-to-person group video calling interactions for the rest of the company as well. Like, for example, Mark just unleashed the metaverse vision, and we unleashed the Workrooms, the environment where you can collaborate with other people while you're in Oculus. And this is a VR environment, but that is powered by the platforms that we built over the years. It's pretty much the same platform that powers all the group calling and group video calling that exists in Messenger and in Instagram. And messaging on Instagram also fits into that category. So it's fairly broad, but everyday use is obviously the Messenger app. But then all that tags that we built is actually used everywhere else as well.

And Messenger is celebrating its 10th anniversary, isn't it, this month? So that's a big milestone for the product itself. But in that time, you know, Facebook and Messenger has changed quite substantially. You know, it was so many years back now that Facebook acquired, you know, that group messaging app Beluga. And since then, messaging in general has changed in terms of how we use messaging apps, what people expect from a messaging app. I just wonder from where you sit in the role that you have at Facebook, about? Where do you see messaging happening? Where has it come from? What's it changed into over the last 10 years?

Well, when I'm thinking about messaging, I generally— for me, everything comes down to analogies with real life, right? Because we as human species developed over the last 50,000 to 100,000 years, and our basic needs are the same. We need to eat. We need to drink. And equally importantly, we need to communicate with other people. Because if you can't communicate with other people, you're not really human anymore. You can't really survive. You would go crazy if you don't have someone to talk to, at least from time to time. And with us moving more and more into the virtual world and with us having more and more capabilities in terms of having those amazing little computers called phones that we are carrying with ourselves all day long, that becomes easier and easier. And that nevertheless continues to be the basic needs that we have as people. So with every new flip of every new platform, as new platform sort of like appears, there is more and more communications happening. And that is true when it was about the radio, when it was about the phone, when it was about the internet in the very beginning, when it was all the desktop, when email came on board, obviously with calling on phones, and then messaging is sort of like the next frontier. So it's just going to continue to grow. And when I'm thinking about the future and I'm thinking about what it's going to be in AR and VR, that's the same thing. Messaging is a killer use case. That's what people want to do. They want to talk to other people around them and they want that more than anything else. And if I was to draw Maslow Pyramid of Needs today, I probably would put communication right there front and center because in today's world you can't even get food and water without talking to somebody.

So how is Messenger's role going to evolve at Facebook? It feels like messaging is— and Messenger itself is moving on from being an app to being kind of a layer across all your services, whether that's VR, the kids services, Portal, etc. And indeed, there was a Bloomberg story earlier this week about messaging coming back into the main Facebook app. Is it true that Messenger will become less of an app and more of a layer? Is that, is that the future?

I would say it completely differently. I would say it becomes more of an app and more of a layer at the same time. Like everything, we are ambitious here at Facebook, as you know. And so we are trying to do more than one thing at once. So I think the use cases are generally different. When I'm thinking about messaging Matt, then I'm going to go to Messenger and I'm going to send him a message and then maybe we jump on a call or we jump on a video call and everything kind of sort of flows from there. But then let's let's say Matt and I are playing game inside Facebook app and I want to continue to play game with him, but I also want to see him while we are playing a game. It does make sense to switch to somewhere else and to have some parallel experience. It makes sense to enable that communication right there in context because that's what probably most convenient for people. And so that's what we are talking about when we are saying that we're going to bring more and more of that functionality back to the apps. And I just think it's convenience when it's contextual and it's paramount when it's one-to-one and it's pointed to me having a conversation with you because I just want to talk to you and that comes first versus the content that comes first when we are like playing a game in my examples that I gave. So we are trying to do both.

Okay. Now, how does that fit into the kind of long-term plan we've heard about to make all Facebook chat products interoperable? Is there still room if chat is everything across, everywhere across Facebook and still an app? Is there room for messaging on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger? How does that work?

The way I think about it, frankly, is that we just wanna give you ability to quickly communicate with whoever you wanna communicate, regardless of where you are. Regardless of where that other party is. And so if I'm on Messenger and you right now are on Instagram and I want to see you or call you or send you something, I should be able to do that without thinking, where are you right now? It should just work. And because one of the ways I'm always thinking about messaging, it's I'm going to use the service that is sort of like most likely is going to be service that I think you are going to use because I want to get to you as fast as possible and I want to make it very convenient to you and I want to make it as convenient to me as possible. So if we can cross that boundary and if we can allow people to communicate from wherever you are to other people regardless of where those people are, that is a real holy grail. So of course there is space for all of those services to connect and work together. And we are trying to build that.

So yesterday you announced a bunch of 10th anniversary features like Poll Games and Birthday Cash Giving and a few other things like the word effects that are coming soon.

Yeah.

And also sound emojis, which I still haven't got access to. I'm in the beta version of Messenger.

Oh, I saw that.

I always wonder whether that means it limits me from seeing some things when it should be showing more of them. I don't know. But I was curious to know how you prioritize features to add because I can imagine that people must pester you all the time they know that you work at Facebook on Messenger, like, can you just add this? Can you change that? And teams internally have their own things that they're kind of keen to push forwards with. And your role must be at some point to kind of make some of these critical decisions.

How do you make those decisions?

Well, sounds like one critical decision I should have made but didn't, which is to make sure that you have access to the Vordifacts. Yeah, it's a good question. What we are trying to sort of do to help us to guide ourselves is just constantly talk to the people who use our services first and foremost and do it in a scientific way. Yes, there is a lot of signal from talking to people who are giving feedback to you, but there is a user research who are like sort of like putting it in more comprehensive way and making more of a global overview without necessarily having certain biases introduced into that. And so we try to guide ourselves based on what people want, what we believe people want, and we are constantly checking against our own biases in that prioritization. And turns out magically that this is something that everyone can get easily behind when it's pretty clear what would be something that people would enjoy doing, then everyone gets in line and really wants to execute on that. So that addresses the question about the team. That addresses the question about the people who are asking me for certain features. As long as I can clearly tell them what is ahead that I think they're going to like even more, they're like, yeah, that makes sense.

Martin, there's a big push in social media across all the platforms to, it seems at the moment, to serve businesses more, especially retailers and creators as well. Creators are the big buzzword everywhere. Messenger is no different in that regard. Why is it so important and how do you see the kind of push towards creators and businesses evolving in Messenger in the future?

Yeah, I'm actually, really excited about everything that sort of people mean when they talk about creator's economy. Because I think obviously to some extent it is a buzzword, but I think it's a buzzword that sort of we're just going to see how it gets filled with substance and more and more and more substance over the many years to come. I think in today's world, more and more people sort of will be able to make money because of their brand and because of how they're thinking about themselves and how they're thinking about their place in the world. And I think that is a hugely democratizing move. And I think for us, what we need to do, and that's across board, but definitely on the Messenger app as well, is to think about all the tools that we can provide to those people in order to be able to really get to the next level when it comes down to talking to their audience, monetizing their audience, monetizing their fan base, continuing to build their brand and so forth, so on. So I think that's actually one of the things that's going to be helpful throughout all the work that we are doing on cross-app communication. Like, for example, Messenger is empowering the DMs in Instagram. And right now you can start talking about between two networks from Facebook to Instagram and back and forth. And I think the set of tools that we're going to build that will allow creators to communicate with their audience that are sort of like lightweight messaging tools. And there are a lot of ideas that teams have in mind around how the whole thing could work. It's going to be groundbreaking from the standpoint of empowering them to take their businesses to the next level. We already have huge success with small businesses across board. Over 3 million small businesses are using, uh, ClickToMessaging ads and, uh, general messaging APIs in order to communicate with their customers. And I think for us to extend that to creators as a first step and then build additional tools, the ones I mentioned on top of that, it's going to be next frontier.

Yeah, so are you talking kind of group messaging but kind of broadcast style, or how does that look?

Yeah, I mean, you can imagine all sorts of products once you start thinking about it, but imagine broadcast style where you can react with emojis, for example, or with likes or hearts and so forth, so on, but don't necessarily will be able to directly communicate with the creator or where you can have a chat conversation about whatever creator is saying with other people who are at the same time watching that live broadcast. That live broadcast can in text form or it can be in video form or it can be in audio form. It can be all sorts of things that I don't think we fully even understand right now, but I think we're going to build a bunch of tools and people are going to enjoy them.

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So when we talked to Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, a few weeks back, we talked to him extensively about what is still one of the hottest topics in terms of messaging and social, which is end-to-end encryption. And Will talked a lot about the work that they're doing at WhatsApp and how important he sees it. And of course, Mark Zuckerberg has talked about Facebook being all encrypted messaging potentially, and Messenger having— and does have some limited encryption features. Why is it so hard to make everything on Messenger encrypted by default? And is that the road that you're still going down at the moment?

We definitely are going down this road. On the question why it's so hard, I think there are 3 vectors in terms of why it's so hard. The one is that yes, we do have end-to-end encrypted messaging capabilities and they are there and people can use it and a lot of people are using it every day because they're enjoying it. But we are full-featured app. We have so many features. We released 10 more today for our 10 years anniversary. You talked about about some of them. We have theme customizations, we have the boards, we have all these effects, we have like all sorts of different features that exist. And they don't all exist in end-to-end encrypted world. They need to be rebuilt in end-to-end encrypted world to fully adhere to the end-to-end encrypted principles. So what we are doing is that we are working hard on rebuilding those things in end-to-end encrypted world. But at the same time, it's not It's not like we are stopping to release the features in the open world to people. We continue to release more and more features. And this week is a good example of that. So we constantly play catch up with ourselves because every single time when we release some news and we also need to now take that and rebuild that in end-to-end encrypted way later on. So we are sort of like in that conversation constantly in terms of like doing two things at But it's not like we can stop it because we need to continue to evolve. We need to continue to give people what they want. We could easily switch earlier, but then what it would mean is that a lot of people will lose a lot of features that they use. And that's not the user experience that we are wanting to sort of sign up for as well, because people will be unhappy and that's not what we do. And the last thing to say there, but it's by far is One of the most important things is all the work that we need to do to mitigate on safety side, all the things that we need to do in order to make sure that we are as safe as possible in the full end-to-end encrypted world. And there is a bunch of work that continues to be done there and we continue to focus on it, but it's It's going to take time when you have billions of people using you every month.

I just wanted to quickly pick up also that Apple has faced a lot of criticism for its approach of scanning child sexual abuse material on iCloud via users' devices. But the approach continues to highlight things with encryption are the biggest problems in terms of it compromising safety for certainly for young users and for other people as well in other walks of life. Do you have any concerns about shifting towards more approach? And do you see Apple's approach as one that makes sense to you?

Do I see— what do I see about shifting to this approach? Well, what I see with shifting with this approach is that we need to work really hard on mitigating a bunch of those things. And that's what we are spending time on. And I also think that there are so many things that you can do based on user reporting that are completely underused and underutilized, that that's the area where I would be focusing throughout versus anywhere else. You can't even easily report anything in many messaging apps out there. And so when you can't easily report, things out there and you default to other mitigations, then it feels like that it's not necessarily the best path for moving forward, especially considering that when bad stuff happens, when bad people start to do things, they don't do it in one thread or two threads. They are trying to actually do bad to many people at once. And so you don't really necessarily need all of them to report. You need one of them to report, and then you can see who else that person that was reported, assuming the report actually proves that the communication was negative and there was something illegal going on. Assuming all that, you can see who else that person is trying to contact, and then from there, you can actually navigate to finding your answer. And I think this is a way better way of rooting out and minimizing bad things that are happening on the platform versus total surveillance when you are just constantly scanning all the images and everything that's going on on people's phones. I think about phone as a little bit as a wallet, right? So whatever I put in my wallet, I assume I'm the only one who knows that it's there and what that is. And it's not like it's constantly being scanned for new stuff I put in there.

So, one of the other things that we wanted to talk to you about as well is, you know, quickly is this metaverse. And Mark Zuckerberg has talked a lot about Facebook's big bets on VR and the metaverse. And earlier we talked about the evolution of Messenger. Facebook's vision of the future for social is one that's a mixed reality, and it's certainly not on your mobile phone. How do you think Messenger will look in that kind of a world?

Have you kind of—

how do you envision it looking in 10 years from now for people who use it every day?

Great question. I actually think about two things. I was thinking when you asked that question. Number one is that, as I mentioned, I don't think messaging or need for communicating is going to go anywhere. I think with the shift with every new platform, it just increases. And I think shift into VR world is not going to be any different. Number 2, I think about Messenger in that environment that you are describing as actually bridge between 2D world in which you and I are in right now and 3D world in which we are when we are putting our devices on our heads and we are entering the wonderful world of VR. I don't really necessarily see a world, and we can argue whether it's for better or worse, where all the people are in VR all the time. That's clearly not something that's going to happen anytime soon. And so what it means is that most of the people are going to be in VR from time to time, but not all the time. What it also means is that you and I very often going to be walking around with our phones or something that looks like our phones. And we would want to communicate to people, with people in VR and what those bridges look like, because I should be able to really quickly call somebody or do a video chat or send a message to someone who is in VR right now. That person needs to be able to accept that message or should be able to see me. That person should understand that I'm not necessarily in VR with her or with them, but I am still available to communicate. And they should understand what mode of communication is actually available to me. That bridge needs to exist. That product needs to exist. And that's probably going to be majority of communication once VR really takes over. And I see our role as being that bridge between these two worlds. Worlds, 2D world in which you and I are in right now and 3D world in which we could be right now if we put Oculus on our heads.

Is a lot of the effort or some of the effort in terms of the development of Messenger also around moving away from the physically typing out messages to being maybe voice command led or other forms of interface where it's not necessarily the typing of the message, it's going to be done through other means. Is that part of the roadmap of how you see people using messaging apps, or do you think that's sort of sci-fi and too distant from here?

No, no, I actually think you're right on. I think there is a lot of stuff that is already happening because, again, like video communication and different forms of video communication and one-way streaming video communication, when I just like tap the button and and you get the instant video of me, but I don't see you necessarily until you enable your video and then you reciprocate. And sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. The avatar-based communication, when I'm just saying something and then my avatar on another end says that to you and it looks very natural. And that if you're on your phone, then it just looks like my avatar is talking to you. If you're in in VR, then you'll just see that avatar. There are so many modes that are going to emerge. And I think there is a lot in between sort of like me typing, me talking to the mic, and then that thing being transcribed and sent to you. You're communicating, you are getting it via clip, or you are getting it by video, or you're getting it via avatar as a medium of exchange. It's a huge spectrum. One thing I can tell you is that video conversations and group video conversations are growing really, really fast, way faster than anything else on the ecosystem. And I think that's data proof of the fact that people want richer and richer communication to be available to them. And that trend also So clearly just starting.

Thanks to Stan for taking the time to talk with us. We could have talked for a lot longer.

Look out for our next episode featuring our chat with Katie Carroll of LinkedIn News very soon. That one is particularly useful if you're involved in journalism or PR.

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