Facebook's New Manifesto

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Yesterday, Facebook’s CEO posted a manifesto outlining plans for a seismic shift in strategy—one toward encrypted, private, and ephemeral communication.

• Instead of focusing on the kind of publicly shared content that 1) made Facebook worth hundreds of billions and 2) continues to haunt you in your “On This Day” feature, Facebook will become a “privacy-focusedcommunications platform.”

The motive: People increasingly want to communicate privately or in smaller groups instead of “the digital equivalent of a town square,” Zuck said. Don’t believe him? Poll your 10 group chats. And to adapt to that evolution, Facebook (+0.73%) will rebuild many of its features.

How does that happen?

Glad you asked, since we’ve got 3,220 of Zuck’s own words to figure it out.

“I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever,” Zuck wrote.

• All of FB’s messaging platforms will start looking more like WhatsApp—with end-to-end encryption becoming standard. It’ll also consider deleting messages by default after a month or year.

Will the changes dent business? Well, private/encrypted messaging tools could breed new business ventures like payments and commerce—which have become Facebook’s “current pet obsessions,” writes The Verge’s Casey Newton.

Keep in mind: Zuck told the WSJ he doesn’t “view this as replacing the public platform,” but instead developing more “around the intimate and private communications.” Which, Zuck admits, could use work.

• “Frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services...But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want.”

While this is a big shift for Facebook, money talks and a blog post without any follow through walks. Unless he can actually deliver on his promise of Facebook 2.0, Zuck will be stuck with his bad reputation for keeping data safe.

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The same old "Town Square" that has always been here.....

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• Facebook (+0.39%) stored hundreds of millions of users’ passwords as plain text on an internal database tens of thousands of employees could access. It said it will alert users who've been affected.