It seems Mark Zuckerberg will do just about anything to keep Facebook from being a $200 billion one-hit wonder -- even build the anti-Facebook.
While his company has four massively popular products, only one of them was developed in-house as a standalone offering. The others were acquired (Instagram and WhatsApp) or, in the case of Messenger, started out as a feature within what Facebookers call "the big blue app" only to be spun out on its own, forcibly.
In recent months, Zuckerberg has made it clear that he sees Facebook's future not in being one all-embracing platform but as a suite of products and services catering to different audiences, including some that don't have much use for core Facebook. It's a solid thesis but the company has yet to demonstrate that it can execute on it short of throwing around ever larger sums to buy anything that looks like a competitive threat. The apps it has built from scratch -- Poke, a Snapchat wannabe; Paper, a news reader; Slingshot, a curiously high-concept photo-sharing app that also has some Snapchat-like functionality -- have met with minimal success.
Now comes the news that Facebook's latest skunkworks project is an anonymity app -- "a stand-alone mobile application that allows users to interact inside of it without having to use their real names," as the New York Times describes it. It's an obvious reaction to a wave of new offerings that promise to give users more control over what kinds of information they share with others and what happens to their content after they post it.
It's also a surprising reversal. Zuckerberg has long held that real identity is a crucial ingredient in online communities that work; he famously said that maintaining a pseudonymous identity "is an example of a lack of integrity." For that reason, the company has resisted even innocuous requests by its users to go by anything other than their given names.
The first sign that Zuckerberg was reconsidering this stance came in April, at the f8 conference, when he announced a new "Anonymous Login" feature for third-party apps. But he portrayed it less as a privacy tool than a way to let users test drive new apps without committing the full weight of their social media profiles.
Even if Zuckerberg's conversion was sincere and wholehearted, it's hard to see anyone who sets a high value on anonymity trusting anything out of Facebook. If it's intent on getting into the privacy-app business, it might have to once again resort to buying rather than building. Secret and Whisper, two popular anonymous-sharing apps, would both be comfortably within Facebook's budget: Whisper was most recently valued by investors at $200 million, and Secret at about half that. But both also come with baggage that might be offputting to an acquirer that already has plenty of its own. Most recently, Buzzfeed reported that scammers have been using Whisper to trick women into sharing nude photos of themselves.
In general, the greater the anonymity a platform provides, the more its users will use it to propagate pornography, hate speech and other types of NSFW content. Facebook has historically had close to zero tolerance for that sort of thing, even to the point of getting into clashes over whether breastfeeding photos and fine art nudes are permissible. If Facebook is serious about embracing anonymity, it might have to rethink those prohibitions as well.
