Facebook Taking Over the Telephone

Facebook was born 11 years ago. It was February 2004, and Mark Zuckerberg, then 20, along with a few of his college peers, founded the site, which was originally intended just for Harvard University students. Soon, the platform was also opened to students from other schools in the Boston and surrounding area, then later to high school students — and therefore to whomever declared that he or she was over 13 years old. The name of what, in short, would become the most visited social platform in the world emerged from the book with an index of photographs and names of students that each U.S. university distributes at the beginning of the year to registered students in order to facilitate socializing with peers.

A decade ago, the expansion of Zuckerberg’s “creature” was unimaginable. In time, Facebook changed and enriched its applications in order to stimulate its users to increase their activity on the social network. In 2011, for example, in response to the characteristics introduced by its rival Google+ — Google’s social network — it introduced automatic translation of posts and the possibility to share them via mobile devices. Today Facebook has 1.4 billion users, a number that exceeds the entirety of the Chinese population, and while it celebrates this new encouraging achievement, it looks ahead with an extremely ambitious prospective — the telephone market. Many will recall, around a year ago, the criticisms that accompanied the acquisition of the instant messaging platform Whatsapp for $19 billion (a number that was seen as excessive.) Well, 12 months later, the controversial choice is showing how extremely farsighted it was. Facebook’s next step seems to be in fact the conquest of the telephone market, through a voice application for the Whatsapp service. We should remember that the instant messaging service, which counts on the traffic of 30 billion messages per day, as compared to around 20 billion daily messages for the older SMS, and 700 million users — among whom 70 percent are active daily — costs barely 99 cents a year. This is the main reason for its success even in emerging economies like India, which alone has 70 million users.

The effects on the market will be staggering. On the one hand, Facebook, with a voice service over the Internet, will become a competitor to Skype, the low-cost Internet phoning outpost, but on the other hand, it will cannibalize telecom users, ready to migrate over thanks to an economic offer that telecommunications operators cannot provide. The Indian telecom Reliance seems to have adopted the motto, “if you can’t beat them, join them,” having already signed an agreement with the “rising star.” But what will happen to users and the storage of their data? It is certain that embracing Facebook even over the phone will allow the platform to collect sensitive data and information toward the creation of ever more accurate profiles of its users. Other than our friends, the social network will possess our phone book as well, with a tacit agreement on the protection of personal data and the storage of our lives, now on display for some time in “telematic shop windows.” The economic strategy of the platform really seems to have no limits.