Speed is the most important feature for any Internet product these days according to Chris Cox, the chief product officer of Facebook. This is why Cox says the “understanding of how to make great products for every type of device and network is becoming more important for Facebook” and they are responsible for making “products really fast and good on less than optimum network conditions”. Over 138 million Indians use Facebook on a monthly basis and the expectation is that a third of the next billion people to come on the Internet will be in India. “India is the centre piece where all that is happening,” he says.
“You are going to see us continue to push forward at the high-end like 360-degree view. But we are also going to ensure that each feature also has really good delivery on a 2G network,” Cox explains in an interview during his recent visit to
India to meet partners and other stakeholders. He says the Slideshow feature, for instance, now has a tool that lets advertisers specify how the ad appears to somebody on a different connection—turning video into a slideshow—and also target based on device and connectivity.
He adds that the primary Facebook interface for user, the News Feed, will change in a few ways in the coming months. “One, is the migration from text to more immersive and rich experiences. Rather than reading about your day, it is better to feel and experience the day as you feel it. So in the feed you will now see more movement, like 360-degree video, collages, live broadcasts and a new feature called Reactions,” he says. Reactions, now live in five countries, lets users press the like button and respond with a bunch of common reactions. “Since we don’t make the content, all the innovation is happening on how we make the container support more creativity.”
Facebook is also working on more control, giving users the power to
decide what they want to see first, or the power to decide what they want to see more or less of. “There is more and more content every day and there is not more and more time. We want to give every user the 10 most important things they want to talk to their family about over dinner. Our vision is that we need to get to the day where for the tens of thousands of hours of time our billion users spent on Facebook, we understand which of those minutes were really important to them.”
But is messaging going to encroach into the News Feed’s space? “We see them as very complementary services. If you think about what you are doing when you use messenger, we are seeing very high frequency communication with a relatively smaller number of people. If you look at what you are doing with News Feed or Instagram, you are checking in multiple times a day to see what’s going on. Both are massive markets with massive problems to solve with lots of room to grow and this is why we are investing massively in the family of applications,” explains Cox, who is part of the leadership and leads Facebook’s product management, design, and marketing functions globally.
“Even in the middle, if you think of newsfeed as one to many and messaging as one to few, there are groups and events which are huge, very quickly growing features,” he says, citing how even in India, the number of groups users doubled in the past year. Also, Cox says there is no plan to integrate WhatsApp and Facebook, despite the massive popularity of the messaging platform. “We operate WhatsApp pretty independently, so that WhatsApp and Facebook can both move quickly. If you look at Instagram and Facebook, there is some amount of threading, but largely they exist as their own ecosystems.”
Incidentally, Cox was in India for the first business meetings of his new years, underlining the importance the social network has for India. “India is the second largest developer community we have. As much as 75% of the top grossing apps in India use Facebook for login. There are a lot of ways we can work better together,” he says. Facebook is also initiating FB Start in India, a programme that’s already given out $20 million to Indian entrepreneurs. “We are heavily invested in being a part of the growing ecosystem in India. We are here to talk to them about what features we can build to better support them— things like Augmented Traffic Control which tells them how an app is performing on different networks and devices. We have a lot of stuff that we are working on for ourselves, which we can open up as soon as it’s good enough.”
