As a class, we’ve looked into the process of “unbundling.” Technologies, including websites, will begin dividing into separate programs, giving users the opportunity to select exactly which ones they want to use. This trend has pros and cons; more specialized content could be delivered directly to users without all the “junk” they don’t want attached to it, but they’ll also pay dearly for these individual services. It’s hard to imagine exactly what this will look like, because the unbundling process is still in its early stages. We can, however, apply it to a site that most Americans use daily: Facebook. According to the recent data, mobile apps will continue to play a major role in the mobile revolution, and one of the most popular apps is Mark Zuckerberg’s very own brainchild.
“Despite every hipster prediction otherwise, the company’s user base keeps growing, and nearly a fifth of the time that Americans spend on their smartphones is spent on Facebook. That surpasses the amount of time we spend on any other single service by a wide margin — and beats just about anything else we do on our phones, or perhaps in our lives, period.”
Let’s think about this. If you spend 20% of our mobile time on our Facebook app, where is the other 80% spent? Probably on messenger apps, entertainment apps or news apps. Now, what if Facebook designed apps to meet these needs? Paper, a new app designed by Facebook developers, shares the news you want; each user can select the content they receive. So, if you usually spend 20% of your time looking at mobile news apps, now you'll be devoting 40% of your time to Facebook without even knowing it. Paper is unique for several reasons, but perhaps the biggest one is that is looks very little like the Facebook app.
“In the past, [Zuckerberg] said, Facebook was one big thing, a website or mobile app that let you indulge all of your online social needs. Now, on mobile phones especially, Facebook will begin to splinter into many smaller, more narrowly focused services, some of which won’t even carry Facebook’s branding, and may not require a Facebook account to use.”
What we’ll likely begin to see is a host of apps by Facebook that look nothing like the original design. That way, if we’re spending time using apps other than Facebook, we could still be putting money in Zuckerberg’s pocket.