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In this file photo taken on January 15, 2019, the logo of social network Facebook is displayed on a smartphone in Nantes, western France. Photo: AFP

Facebook outlines steps towards building a privacy-focused platform, in nod to China’s WeChat

  • The changes on Facebook are putting its Groups, which can be public or private, at the centre of the platform
Facebook

Facebook has unveiled a redesign aimed at emphasising private, group-based communications and introducing a close friend circle for its messaging service, in a nod to the way in which China’s messaging and social media super-app WeChat operates.

The changes on Facebook are putting its Groups, which can be public or private, at the centre of the platform, enabling users to chat directly with friends and people with similar interests, and share content in Groups from the News Feed page.

Facebook’s Messenger app, on the other hand, will become its own social network built around messaging. Later this year the company will roll out a dedicated space to view content and messages from close friends and families and share with them in the same space, rather than on public Facebook content pages.

“As the world gets bigger and more connected, we need that sense of intimacy more than ever. So that is why I believe that the future is private. This is the next chapter for our services,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of Facebook, at the company’s annual F8 conference on Tuesday.

Marking the app’s shift from “town square” to the “living room” of users, Zuckerberg’s remarks echo similar comments made by Allen Zhang, WeChat’s creator, in January when he said that the town square model is creating a lot of stress for users and they prefer a more intimate environment.

Facebook and Tencent did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the issues in this report.

“Facebook has struggled to find ways for its users to feel that they have valuable ways to share and engage in interesting discussions with relevant groups of people versus the wider platform in recent years,” said Ben Cavender, a Shanghai-based analyst at China Market Research Group.

“They've seen just how popular WeChat has become as a platform for sharing within smaller, more private groups and realised that this is something that might work similarly well for them ... the challenge though is that in more mature markets like the US, consumer trust in the platform is very low.”

WeChat, developed by Tencent Holdings and with over a billion users, is heavily centred around the basic functions of messaging and social media. Moments, its social media space that Messenger’s new ‘close friends circle’ resembles, is open only to WeChat friends.

Compared to Facebook’s efforts to help users discover new groups by recommendation, WeChat employs a more hands-off process. Users can only join groups by invitation of an existing member, but the group can boost its visibility by sharing a QR code that works as a link to the group.

In a WeChat group, users can share content, make group video chats, join polls, make group buying purchases or even give out money to its group members. While Facebook promises end-to-end encryption for all private communications, WeChat messages are not encrypted, which has led to criticism that the app is not doing enough to protect user data.

WeChat has become even more popular in China by offering a wide range of mini programs, which are applications smaller than 10 megabytes that can run instantly on WeChat’s interface to enable users to shop, hail a taxi, order food, pay utility bills and more – all without leaving the platform. Its own digital payment method, WeChat Pay, also makes these transactions possible within the app.

To help users shop more easily, Facebook is pushing its e-commerce efforts too. Marketplace, a function on the Facebook app, will process shipping and payment in the app for the first time, instead of arranging this privately outside Facebook as it did before.

Its photo sharing app Instagram will allow users to shop for items worn by people and creators within the app – by simply tapping on their posts. The tags were only available to companies previously.

Zuckerberg earlier in March said he regretted not taking note of China’s super-app WeChat sooner, after his announcement about Facebook’s planned changes and amid an ongoing public backlash over the platform’s use of personal data.

With a focus on private messaging, Facebook will “build more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services,” Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post.

With a population of 1.4 billion people and spanning a vast geographical area, China is home to over 829 million internet users and a gigantic trove of data, which has given rise to a wave of pioneering innovations and unique business models, such as social commerce, bike sharing and super apps.

Snapchat was one of the Western apps to take a leaf out of WeChat’s playbook with the introduction of its Snap Games platform, which allows users to play real-time, multiplayer games inside the company’s flagship messaging app, an in-app gaming function familiar to China’s WeChat users.

In a move to expand shopping features in July, Instagram allowed merchants to add shopping tags to their social media posts, a feature China’s social commerce companies, such as Xiaohongshu, have been using since 2015.

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