Indian Prime Minister Tells Zuckerberg Social Media Creates A New Form Of Diplomacy

Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Mark Zuckerberg that social media can show governments where they’re going wrong, and allow heads of state to connect more personably than ever before. During a townhall Q&A at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, the two leaders talked about the modernization of India and discussed topics from the 40,000 questions and comments submitted by the public. The talk can be watched here.

As the world’s largest democracy and a massively lucrative market for tech companies, execs from several tech giants made time to meet with Modi during his visit to Silicon Valley this week, including Google, Apple, and Tesla, as Re/Code reported.

Modi is likely pushing his vision for Digital India, in hopes that tech companies invest more there so the sector can drive greater economic outcomes for the nation. However, Internet accessibility campaigns in India like Facebook’s Internet.org have endured criticism from those who think making certain companies gateways to the web could hurt Net Neutrality. Zuckerberg spoke at the U.N. yesterday pushing the idea that investments in Internet accessibility can alleviate poverty.

Zuckerberg began today’s talk by noting how his own travels to India reassured his confidence in building Facebook as an independent company.

“Early on in our history, before things were really going well and we had hit a tough patch and a lot of people wanted to buy Facebook and thought we should sell the company, I went and I saw one of my mentors Steve Jobs. And he told me that in order to reconnect with what I believed as the mission of the company, I should visit this temple that he had gone to in India early on in his evolution of thinking about what he wanted Apple and his vision of the future to be.

And so I went and I traveled for almost a month seeing the people, seeing how the people connected. And having the opportunity to feel how much better the world could be if everyone had a stronger ability to connect reinforced for me the importance of what we were doing. And that is something that I’ve always remembered over the last 10 years as we built Facebook.”

After thanking Modi for his commitment to creating a digital India, Modi returned the praise, complimenting Zuckerberg on being a role model for technologists.

Modi said that India is an $8 trillion economy today, but he dreams of it becoming a $20 trillion economy. Getting there will take success in three sectors:

• Agricultural sector
• Service sector
• Manufacturing sector

Modi sees social media as driving the service sector and tourism in India. It has the potential to educate people faster, by connecting us to human guides rather than textbooks.

Via translator, Modi told Zuckerberg that social media “brought about a big change in my way of thinking”. He says people ostensibly vote via social media constantly, by sharing their opinion. It can make governments aware that they’re going in the wrong direction and gives them an opportunity to do a course correction.

Modi told the crowd “we used to have elections every five years, now we have them every five minutes.” If governments pay attention to this real-time information, they can improve their policy frameworks and speed up progress.

Social Diplomacy

Perhaps most interestingly, Modi described how he sees social media changing relationships between whole governments.

 He told a story of how he wished China’s Prime Minister a happy birthday via Chinese social network Sina Weibo, and how that received a huge positive reaction from the public. Similarly, he congratulated the the Israeli Prime Minister in Hebrew for a festival in the country, and the Israeli Prime Minister thanked him in Hindi. That too went viral.

“I don’t think anyone ever thought this is what diplomacy would look like” Modi said.

When asked about India’s commitment to empowering women, Modi launched into a passionate defense of the country’s initiatives to support gender equality. He noted that India was uniquely suited to the task as some of its gods are female. He said the nation’s “fundamental values” position women in a very important place.

Citing programs reserving places in goverment for women, offering financial support through housing only if women are the primary home operator, and the “Educate the girl child” campaign, Modi said India was making progress.

Modi admitted that “it’s true over thousands of years we’ve had a certain deterioration. But as far as the government is concerned, if we want to achieve our economic goals then we cannot do that if we imprision 50% of our population within their homes.”

While today’s talk went smoothly, Facebook and India will still have to resolve the Internet.org situation to see if Facebook can help more Indians get on the web without being seen as excluding certain apps. Facebook is also staunchly pro gay rights, butIndia recently declared same-sex marriage illegal.

But if Zuckerberg and Modi’s relationship can tie Facebook and India closer together, the nation could become an even bigger market for the social network while locals gain access to the knowledge economy. That could not only connect Indians, but improve the average citizen’s quality of life.

40M Active Small Business Pages in Facebook

Facebook is announcing some new programs today for small businesses, particularly ones that advertise. At the same time, the company’s also arguing that plenty of businesses find out value on the social network without buying ads.

Specifically, Facebook says the number of active small business Pages keeps growing — it’s up to 40 million, compared to 30 million last June. And only 2 million of them are active advertisers.

The fact that there are so many active businesses that don’t bother with ads seems particularly noteworthy given the declining reach of organic (non-ad) content from Facebook Pages. But Jonathan Czaja, Facebook’s director of small business for North America, said that creating Pages isn’t just about pushing posts to potential customers.

“Creating a presence on Facebook … is a powerful asset in its own right,” he said.

As for those new programs, Facebook will be holding more events for small businesses around the country, with half-day events in San Diego, Minneapolis, Nashville and Boston.

And for advertisers, it’s also adding one-on-one chat support. The idea of customer support through chats might not seem all that unusual or worth celebrating, but again, we’re talking about millions of advertisers here.

Before now, if you were a small business buying ads on Facebook and you needed help, you had to send an email and wait for a response. Czaja said many of those advertisers were asking for live support, so Facebook is giving it to them. It’s rolling out the program in the United States, United Kingdom, and Ireland in the next few months, with more countries to follow.

“We’ve got hundreds of reps worldwide providing both email and chat support,” Czaja said. “We intend to grow that dramatically in the coming years.”

Facebook Messenger Launches Free VOIP Video Calls

It’s not polite to call someone out of the blue anymore. Best to text them first. That’s why Facebook thinks video calling will live naturally inside Messenger. Today, Messenger is launching free VOIP video calling over cellular and wifi connections on iOS and Android in the U.S., Canada, UK, and 15 other countries.

Facebook’s goal is to connect people face to face no matter where they are or what mobile connection they have. With Messenger, someone on a new iPhone with strong LTE in San Francisco could video chat with someone on a low-end Android with a few bars of 3G in Nigeria.

Facebook first introduced desktop video calling in partnership with Skype in 2011, but eventually built its own video call infrastructure. Bringing it to mobile could Messenger a serious competitor to iOS-only FaceTime, clunky Skype, and less-ubiquitous Google Hangouts.

With 600 million Messenger users and 1.44 billion on Facebook, the new VOIP video feature has a massive built-in audience. Mark Zuckerberg said on last week’s Facebook earnings call that Messenger already accounts for 10% of global mobile VOIP calls. He believes free, high audio quality VOIP will displace traditional phone calling, and video calling could accelerate that.

Messenger has no plans to charge for audio or video calling. Instead, it knows more messaging drives lock in with Facebook’s News Feed where it makes tons of money from ads. Facebook Messenger’s Head Of Product Stan Chudnovsky who led the video calling feature tells me, “Whatever’s good for Messenger is good for Facebook as a company.”

Messenger Face-To-FaceTime

Video calling in Messenger will become available today for iOS and Android users in Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Laos, Lithuania, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Uruguay. More regions will be added in the coming months.

If you have access, you’ll see the video camera icon in the top right corner when you’re having a Messenger chat with a friend who can be called. Tapping it starts a video call, which opens when the recipient accepts. Cameras start in selfie mode but you can toggle to the backside camera to show a friend what you’re doing.

Messenger will adjust the quality of the call according to your connection. The demo I saw showed just a hint of pixelation and strong frame rate with 2 bars of LTE service in SF. It’s easy to switch to just VOIP audio, and Facebook will gracefully notify you if the connection weakens to where video won’t work. It’s all free on Facebook’s side, and users will only be charged for data use by their mobile operator, which they can avoid by using Wi-Fi.

One smart thing Messenger allows is for one person to turn off their video feed to make the other person’s high quality. This way if you’re sitting at home and a friend is on a mountain in Norway, you can give them the extra bandwidth because what matters is seeing their scenery, not them seeing your bedroom.

This is v1, though, and Chudnovsky said the Messenger team was working on a bunch of secondary features I asked about, including group video calling and video stabilization. “Group video calling is definitely a use case that a lot of our people might be interested in at some point…[and] it would be a big deal if the whole [shakes hand to simulate lack of video stabilization] thing goes away.” Those could help Messenger compete with Google’s Hangouts, which is filled with bells and whistles.

A big question raised by the launch is whether this could pave the way for Facebook to enter the mobile livestreaming market, where Meerkat and Twitter’s Periscope are making waves. “We’re building infrastructure that will allow us to do anything we want with video” Chudnovsky explains. Still he wouldn’t say if Facebook’s moving in the livestreaming direction. “We’re not thinking about what our second, third, fourth, and fifth steps will. We’re goingto look at the data and decide what we need to do. there’s are 20 different ways we can take it.”

Perhaps the most glaring omission for now is that mobile Messenger users can’t video call with desktop Facebook users, but Chudnovsky says that should be patched relatively soon. On mobile, he thinks video calling in Messenger will be much more convenient than having to either video call someone suddenly, or switch apps. “You don’t have to close it, go to another app, launch that app, connect with them in that other app, and then finally starting the call with brain damage from how you’re actually doing it.”

Software Is Eating Phones…And Data Plans

Chudnovsky knew Facebook needed to build mobile video calling after doing feedback sessions about Messenger’s audio calling feature. “Unprompted, a lot of people said ‘we’d like to have a face-to-face conversation over Messenger” he tells me.

Building video into a chat app means these conversations can be emergent, spontaneous experiences, rather than scheduled occurrences. “Everything starts from a text conversation these days” Chudnovsky explains. “I’m not going to call you any more. I’m going to text you and ask if you have three minutes for a phone call.” Instead they can text in Messenger, and switch to video with one tap.

This will also let Facebook promote Messenger video calling without being too annoying. For example, Chudnovsky imagines two people Messenger text chatting for hours, one in a hotel room in NY, another in a room in Paris, both on Wi-Fi. Messenger could notify them that they could turn their chat into a video call for free. It will let them go out and find the feature if they’re on on a cellular connection, but will remind them they could have a more vivid connection for free when possible.

This is all part of Facebook’s philosophy that its products have to be good enough to grow without massive cross-promotional help. It’s often let products like Facebook Deals or Home die rather than pester its nearly one and a half billion people to use them. “It’s survival of the fittest inside the company. Only products and features people actually want survive and that’s how the product keeps getting better and better” Chudnovsky reveals. Hocking something that doesn’t work? “That’s not our mojo”, he says.

Protecting people from their own data usage will be important for the feature. Though Facebook offers a way to disable auto-play of News Feed videos when you’re not on Wi-Fi to save people’s data plans, some users who didn’t still felt burned when they saw their bills.

The Messenger team has done extensive work to try to crunch the data needed for video calling as small as possible. When I asked how Messenger compares to Skype or Hangouts’ data usage, Chudnovsky wouldn’t be specific but said “We’ve been doing a lot of benchmarking and we’re very happy. Very happy.”

Overall, Messenger’s voice and video quality were strong despite an imperfect mobile connection. And since everyone you know is probably already on Facebook and connected to you, and you can easily find new contacts there, Messenger could take the hassle out of simulating a face-to-face conversation. Chudnovsky concludes, “This is what Facebook is supped to be doing, which is removing friction from everything.”

“Hello” Is Facebook’s New Android-Only Social Caller ID App

Say goodbye to calls from unknown numbers. Facebook’s newest app Hello instantly matches phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls to Facebook profiles to show you info about who you’re talking to, block calls from commonly blocked numbers, and search for businesses to call. Today, Hello is rolling out for public testing in the US, Brazil, and Nigeria, but the catch is that it’s Android-only since iOS won’t let apps interact with phone calls.

Hello’s caller ID feature could clue you in to whether you want to pick up a call from a number you don’t have saved by showing their name and profile picture — as long as they haven’t changed the default privacy setting that lets people search from using their phone number. You’ll then see whatever info they share publicly or with you, like city, employer, website, and more.

Technically, nothing is changing about Facebook privacy, though it does make personal info more readily visible. Hello essentially just runs an immediate Facebook graph search on any number you call or that calls you.

Hello works and looks quite similar to caller ID app TrueCaller. Last month, Android Police spotted Facebook experimenting with an employees-only version off Hello codenamed “Phone”.

Facebook’s now officially testing the app publicly, as Hello Product Manager Andrea Vaccari says there’s a big problem to solve. “More than 1 billion phone calls are made in the US ever day” he tells me. But “the experience of the phone call hasn’t evolved in a long time.”

Here’s a short video from Facebook showing Hello in action:

Hello World

Hello was built over the last year by a lean team connected to Facebook Messenger, and led by Vaccari. He came to Facebook with the acquisition of his social location startup Glancee, and was the lead on one of the company’s smartest recent product launches, Nearby Friends. “This started as a small group of people

This started as a small group of people passionate about this opportunity. A few months ago we showed it to Mark [Zuckerberg] and he really liked it, and he gave us support to build it. David [Marcus] and the Messenger team were also very supportive.” The app will continue development as part of Facebook’s Creative Labs initiative for building standalone apps.

Vaccari lays out a few big ways that phone calling is broken today. “If you get a call from a number you don’t know, you probably don’t answer it” he tells me. But it could be someone you want to talk to. Hello could solve this by giving you the context needed to intelligently decide whether this is someone you want to talk to or not. In that sense, Hello shares some DNA with Google’s contextual computing system Google Now.

Vaccari also laments that “Anyone with your number can ring you day or night and interrupt you”. While other forms of communication often require our consent, a telemarketer can buy your number and call you incessantly without permission. Hello’s blocking feature could return control to a number’s owner.

“Calling is really big. It’s core to how people connect with each other, including family and close friends, but also businesses and colleagues” Vaccari exclaims.

The New Facebook Phone

Starting today, access to test the Hello app will start rolling out to Android users in the US, Brazil, and Nigeria. If the test goes well, more countries will be added in the coming weeks.

Once downloaded, you sign in with Facebook, and give it permissions to sync your contacts with Facebook and interact with calls. After that, you can decide whether you want to actively use Hello, or let it just passively surface information about incoming calls.

Here are Hello’s features:

Synced Phone Book

With permission, Hello will add profile pictures and other info to the contacts in your address book. It can also serve as an enhanced version of your phone book, with extra info about friends and others shown inline as you scroll through contacts.

Caller ID

When a Hello user receives a call, Facebook will reference the phone number against its database. If the caller has left their “Who can look you up using the phone number you provided?” privacy setting to the default of “Everyone” or a more private category like “Friends Of Friends” that you’re part of, it will show their name and profile picture.

If they share other bio info with you, including current city, home town, employer, job title, education, website, or it’s their birthday today, you’ll see that too. All the information appears in a card overlaid on your screen while the phone is ringing, and you can swipe it away.

If you use Hello as an address book or dialer app, you’ll also get info about people you’re calling. When you punch in a number or call one of your contacts, you could get a heads up about who they are, or if they have a new job or moved to a new city.

Free VOIP Calls

If you hang up on someone or end a call, you’ll see another card of info about them which shows if that caller has Facebook Messenger installed. From there, you can make a one-tap Voice Over IP call to them for free. This feature could be especially useful in developing nations where phone calls can be expensive. If someone calls you, you could just ignore the standard call, then VOIP call them right back at no charge. Combined with Hello’s Caller ID, this could let people avoid paying to be bothered.

Business Search

Hello features a smart search bar at the top of its screen. From there you can easily search for your Facebook friends and contacts, but also anyone else, or businesses too. Facebook imports information like phone number, address, and open hours into the info card about businesses, and lets you call them with a single tap. Hello could pick away at some use cases of Yelp and Google in this way, since you can also just search “Pizza” to get the numbers of pizza places.

Call Blocking

Hello can tell you if an incoming call comes from a commonly blocked number. And if enough people have blocked it, Hello can prevent your phone from ringing or vibrating and just automatically send the call straight to voicemail to save your sanity. This and many other settings can be tweaked inside Hello.

Opt Out

In general, I don’t find the Hello privacy defaults to be problematic, but there isn’t a simple way to just opt out of having your info appear in the app.

The best method is to go to your Who Can Find Me settings on Facebook, and narrow the group of people “Who can look you up using the phone number you provided”. This way your basic info won’t appear to strangers you call. You can then go to your About section and reduce the visibility of who can see your phone number, so Facebook can’t match it to friends you call either.

To stay private without cutting off Hello entirely, consider switching who can you find you by phone number to Friends Of Friends, and limiting the extra bio info you share publicly. This way only friends of friends will be able to see who you are when you call, and they’ll only get your name, and profile picture.

One thing Hello doesn’t do is offer crowdsourced caller ID. Just because a bunch of other Hello users have someone listed under the same name doesn’t mean you’ll see that name if they call you. They have to make that info available to you via Facebook.

This is why I think Vaccari has become one of Facebook’s best product people. Nearby Friends could have constantly broadcasted your location, but Vaccari wouldn’t let it because it would have been creepy. Same for crowdsourced caller ID. After years of privacy stumbles, Facebook needs leaders like Vaccari that can combine respect for the user with smart design to make products that are both useful and safe.

Hello$ ?

Vaccari says Facebook isn’t working on trying to monetize Hello right now. Still, there are plenty of opportunities.

Directly, the business search feature opens the opportunity for Facebook to sell search result ads. Imagine searching for “Pizza” in Hello, and seeing an ad for a local pizza joint next to the listings for an Italian restaurant you Like on Facebook and a pizza place you have saved in your phone. Facebook temporarily tried something similar withsearch result ads for games and Pages in 2012.

Hello could also potentially work with Facebook’s upcoming business instant messaging feature, which will let youMessenger chat with ecommerce retailersyou’ve just bought something from to make changes or get customer support.

But at the very least, Hello could strengthen platform lock-in with Facebook as a whole. That’s how the company looks to benefit from many of its new products. As long as they make you use Facebook more, you’ll see its News Feed ads, which earned it $3.59 billion in Q4 2014.

Hello could boost Messenger texting and VOIP call usage, create links back to Facebook in users’ address books, encourage people to keep their bio info up to date, and serve as a constant reminder of the social network.

Phone Home

Hello isn’t Facebook’s first swing at Android-only software, but the first was certainly a miss. Facebook launched its Android launcher Home two years ago, and watched it promptly flop. The main problem was that it tried to totally redefine how you used your phone, altering your lockscreen, app navigation, chat, and more.

Luckily, Vaccari tells me his team learned from Home’s mistakes. “Hello is more of a targeted experience. Home was more integrated with your phone. Something Hello is doing right is that we’re not trying  to reinvent the way you use your phone. Hello is very gentle…it simply adds relevant information when it can.”

“This is caller ID 2.0″ Vaccari concludes.

Facebook and Uber interested in buying Nokia HERE Maps, report says

Bidding over Nokia’s HERE Maps is apparently heating up, and now it turns out Facebook may be in the running as well. A new report from Manager Magazin in Germany claims the social network is interested acquiring in the mapping service, though it’s facing some steep competition.

According to earlier reports, Uber may also make an offer, and a group of German companies including BMW, Audi and Daimler are in the running as well. Manager Magazin notes that the trio of carmakers have already submitted an offer to Nokia, though they may not be willing to spend more than HERE’s current value of €2.1 billion.

Nokia recently confirmed interest in selling HERE following the news that it will buy Alcatel-Lucent for $16.6 billion. The mapping service will be a useful tool for any buyer looking to distance itself from Google Maps and other third-party alternatives.

That doesn’t mean a deal will necessarily happen. Nokia doesn’t seem particularly desperate to sell, though it may come around if someone makes an irresistible offer.

How Facebook’s React Native Will Change Mobile Apps

Facebook just open-sourced its React Native framework for building mobile apps. React Native promises to let developers write JavaScript while still delivering a real native user interface. That’s a description that might cause non-technical readers to shrug, but I believe this announcement has some profound implications. React Native will soon transform the entire mobile app development industry, affecting everyone who owns a smart device.

A Truce in the HTML vs. Native War

For many years, mobile app developers have had to make a uniquely difficult choice: Do I develop my apps using the native tools from Apple or Google, or do I build my app using some sort of cross-platform solution?

It’s widely accepted that native tools are needed for developers to create the best user experience. They produce faster, neater apps that look and behave the way users expect for each platform.The downside is that those tools are quite hard to learn and time-consuming to use, especially compared to tools used to build web sites. Native tools are also based on completely incompatible programming languages, meaning an app needs to be developed twice or more to run on iOS, Android and other platforms. This is an obvious cost-driver and major pain for the entire industry.

Cross-platform solutions, on the other hand, have mostly been based on web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. All mobile platforms can display web pages, which means you only need to develop one version of an app with web-based tools using a much more rapid workflow. In theory, that is.

In practice, this approach is riddled with performance and compatibility issues, often producing awkward user experiences, and power-consuming apps that warm your device and exhaust your battery. Whenever you get frustrated trying to use a mobile app that feels like a glorified web page, this is typically the reason.

React Native shows strong thought leadership beyond making native user interfaces available to JavaScript developers.

React Native is a new tool that blends these two existing approaches. While allowing developers to write JavaScript, a very popular entry-level language that can run on all mobile devices, it displays the user interface using real native components. This is an attractive lifeline for JavaScript developers. Many of them have dreaded the day they’d finally need to learn the more complicated Objective-C, Swift and Java languages to take the leap into the native apps world.

Although there is still a lot for the platform to prove, React Native shows us we won’t have to make the hard choice between HTML and native for app user interfaces for much longer. Quality native UI is finally available to all those die-hard developers of JavaScript.

Better, More Creative Apps

Digging a bit deeper, React Native shows strong thought leadership beyond making native user interfaces available to JavaScript developers. Perhaps more importantly,Facebook’s deep dive presentation last January presents a completely new workflow, capable of shaving countless hours off a large app project while giving app developers a far more satisfying production experience.

While web developers are able to make changes to code and see the results of those changes almost instantly in a web browser, native app developers must spend minutes waiting for their tools to compile, deploy and launch on a mobile device. This isn’t just a time suck; it also kills the urge to be creative and experiment with new ideas. Corners are cut and developers settle for sub-par results, simply because tweaking and polishing takes so long.

In the years to come, expect cleaner and more responsive apps.

React Native introduces a separation between the native user interface and the logic that drives it, using what is popularly called a “reactive” approach. While the user interface runs on the mobile device, the logic can run anywhere, like in the browser of developers’ computers. This means they can use the tools and workflow from web development. Make a change, see the results instantly on the device or in an emulator; make apps faster, or spend extra time trying out new ideas.

While this alone might not convince everyone to jump to JavaScript and browser tools, what React Native has accomplished is certainly a big inspiration to all tool developers. With an exploding mobile app industry and high demand for developer hours, waiting for computers to recompile and redeploy our apps really needs to become a thing of the past.

An Open, Inspirational Codebase for a New Mobile Era

Now that Facebook has open-sourced the React Native code base, it’s free and available to all, so we can expect both its code and its ideas to seep into other tools and development platforms. The same thing happened with React Native’s predecessor, React.js, a framework for building web-based user interfaces. While being a popular framework in and of itself, the ideas and concepts from React.js have also exerted a strong influence on other frameworks.

What’s all this mean for the end user? In the years to come, expect cleaner and more responsive apps, even for apps produced on a shoestring. High-quality app development will become cheaper, and app developers will become more productiveand creative.

The app industry still suffers under many of the same pains we’ve had since the invention of the smartphone: double work on iOS and Android, difficult-to-use tools and slow development iterations. But now, thanks to Facebook, the path to the new era is clear: Better tools, new ideas and open source codebases.

FacePay or facebookPay?

What if buying something was as easy as Liking it? You’d probably buy a lot more, and buy it through whoever made it so damn simple. Becoming that conduit for payments means more than racking up transaction fees. For the portal to purchase influences not just how you buy, but what.

Today, purchases are fragmented, and so too is that influence. We buy online and offline. Cash, Credit, PayPal, and now Apple Pay. In turn, influence splinters into ads run on television, print, digital, billboards, and other channels. Whether we want something already or not, the ads are supposed make us more intent on actually spending our money.

But there’s a disconnect. A gap between the intent and the purchase. A hole in the funnel where conversions leak out. There’s friction.

And Facebook hates friction almost as much as it loves connection. Eliminating unnecessary steps is almost gospel at Facebook, preached from the product all the way up to the person in charge. Mark Zuckerberg wears a grey t-shirt almost every day to remove the friction of deciding how to dress so he focus elsewhere. Facebook split Messenger off into its own app to save you one extra click on the Messages tab.

Facebook explains its goal to speed up ecommerce purchases at F8 2014

Now Facebook has set its sights on making money simple too.

Last month, Facebook introduced payments to Messenger. In any messaging thread, you’ll be able to tap a “$” button, enter how many dollars you want to send, and instantly transfer that money to a friend.

That’s useful, but it’s probably just the start.

With the new Messenger feature, Facebook added an easy way to connect a debit card to your account. Before, it let you connect a credit card, debit card, or PayPal account to buy ads or virtual goods in games. But now Facebook has a mobile-first, zero-fee payments system, complete with passcode protection and a transactions history, all baked into Messenger.

What Facebook does with payments over the next few years could redefine its business.

Retailers Crave Connection Too

Recently, Facebook has strengthened its relationship with merchants. Rather than keep them at arm’s reach as external entities, its starting to treat retailers a bit more like people.

Facebook began work a few years ago on a feature called “Auto-Fill”. When you went to make purchases in some partnered ecommerce apps and mobile sites, an “Auto-Fill With Facebook” button would appear. Tapping it would fast-switch you into Facebook, then instantly switch back to the store having pulled payment information you had on file with Facebook already. All the billing and shipping info would be automatically populated so you could quickly confirm the purchase without doing a ton of typing.

It’s also been experimenting with a “Buy” button for its commerce ads. The idea is that you could checkout in-line from the News Feed rather than having to leave Facebook to complete your purchase on a third-party site. This cuts out a big step from the conversion funnel, giving buyers fewer chances to change their mind and dump their shopping cart.

In February, Facebook launched a new ad unit for ecomerce. These product ads let businesses show off several specific items for sale, instead of just one or the retailer as a whole. This mirrors Facebook push to let people share richer content over the years, from multi-shot photo stories, to Instagram Layout collages, to auto-play video.

Facebook also acquired personalized shopping search engine TheFind last month. This levels up Facebook’s ability to tune what products are most relevant to which users. Those product ads could get better targeting. Facebook could help a sporting goods retailer show a yoga mat and sneakers to someone interested in hippie stuff, but then the same sneakers paired with bicycle shorts to an avid cycler that lives in a more rural area.

Facebook’s new multi-product ads

Just a few weeks ago, Facebook revealed its most ambitious plan yet to make retailers feel like your friends. It plans to let you message with them. The new Messenger For Business platform previewed at Facebook’s F8 conference will let users making ecommerce purchases to connect with the merchant over Messenger. There, they could get receipts, request changes to an order, or receive customer support in a single message thread rather than a slew of separate emails.

Each of these moves could make Facebook a better portal to commerce, which could attract ad dollars and teach it more about what people want to see so it can tune its News Feed.

Frictionless Commerce

But what’s especially worth pondering is what happens if Facebook becomes the way you actually pay for these purchases. Suddenly, having a mobile-first way to swallow up credit card numbers in Messenger has potential far beyond friend-to-friend payments.

For purchases on third-party sites and apps, Facebook could let you auth in and process the transaction for you. No more typing your payment details again and again. Handling receipts, changes, and support through Messenger would be a natural extension.

Even more important could be how becoming a payments system could turn commerce ads on Facebook into full-fledged storefronts where you can buy and checkout without ever leaving the social network.

It could take time to come to fruition, but if the company seizes on the opportunity, buying something on Facebook could go from:

1. See a Facebook ad for a store or single product
2. Click through and wait for the storefront to load
3. Select what you want to buy
4. Manually type in your payment and shipping information
5. Complete the checkout process
6. Get an email receipt
7. Email or phone to make any changes
8. Get an email shipping confirmation

To:

1. See a relevant, specific product in a Facebook ad targeted to you
2. Tap the “Buy” button
3. Confirm the purchase as your payment info has been auto-filled
4. Get a single Messenger thread with your receipt and confirmations where you can chat to make changes

After traditional ecommerce product retailers, Facebook could turn its new purchase flow on utility services. China’s WeChat lets you book taxis and buy movie tickets from within its messaging app. As I wrote when I reported a week before F8 that Facebook would launch a Messenger platform, first up is content apps for richer sharing and customer-to-business chat. But sources tell me that if Facebook likes how these phases of the platform go, it’s looking into building in simple ways book services like on-demand taxis.

With less friction comes more buying.  We’ll have to wait if Facebook monetizes its identity layer in commerce just by selling ads, or potentially by collecting data insights on purchasing trends, or even scoring a share of sales revenue.

But as long as Facebook can dangle more sales in front of retailers, they’ll make it richer somehow.