Social Media Concerns: Getting to the bottom of Facebook’s diversification

The company also outlined new developments in its efforts to get more businesses to sell merchandise directly inside Facebook and the company’s other apps.

You spend way too much time on the internet. These zillion experiments could transform Facebook from the place where we connect with fellow gardening lovers or shout about politics to — well, I don’t know what Facebook might become. The company’s constant tinkering raises the question: Is Facebook trying so hard because it’s excited about what’s next, or perhaps because, like its peers, it is no longer so adept at predicting and then leading digital revolutions? It’s worth paying attention to Facebook’s attempts at reinvention, or whatever it’s doing. Facebook’s choices rewire how billions of people interact, the ways businesses reach their customers and the strategies of every other tech company.

So what’s going on? Why is Facebook stuffing its apps with so many new features? Partly, I think, we’re seeing a conundrum facing many successful companies: Is it smarter to go off in new directions, but at the risk of tinkering so much that the company kills its golden goose? I asked my colleague Mike Isaac, an astute watcher of Facebook’s inner workings, whether Facebook was trying so many things because it’s optimistic about new opportunities or because it’s worried about staying still. He said the answer was probably both. On the optimism side is the reality that successful companies have a lot of power to repeat their successes. Maybe Facebook’s copycats of Zoom, TikTok or Nextdoor aren’t great, but the company has many ways to nudge the billions of people using its apps to try them out, until everyone we know is Zooming on Facebook. Big Tech operates under a kind of Manifest Destiny — a belief that powerful companies can and should constantly expand the frontiers of what they do to keep growing.

On the fear front, maybe it seems ridiculous that a company being sued and investigated for being too powerful might be worried about failing. But Mark Zuckerberg, like many tech bosses, obsesses over the history of technology in which evolutionary changes have repeatedly ruined what seemed to be unstoppable industry leaders. There is no guarantee that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp will remain dominant communications or entertainment choices for billions of people. It is far from a sure thing that Facebook, which generates nearly all of its revenue from selling ads to businesses that want to get our attention, can figure out how to make real money from podcasts or from turning WhatsApp into a go-to way that a dress shop or fruit vendor sells products.

Have Big Tech companies become so big and successful that they’ve lost their touch? One reason Facebook became the company that we know today is that Zuckerberg and other executives understood before almost anyone else how the internet — and smartphones most of all — would change human communications and give Facebook novel ways to profit from those interactions. Tech executives aren’t oracles, but wow, Zuckerberg got a few big predictions right.